Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: Fâilâtün Fâilâtün Fâilâtün Fâilün

Ġam degil bi’llâh ḫarâb olsa bu çerġ-ı âsiyâb
Çûn derûnunda bizim yoḳ ḥabbe vāḥid dânemiz

In English

1. By God, it is no sorrow if this millstone of the heavens falls into ruin, for within it we have not a single grain of our own.

Literary and Historical Commentary

The Mill and the Grain

The “çerḫ-ı âsiyâb”, the millwheel or the mill of the heavens, is an image often used in divan poetry: the turning vault of the sky is likened to a mill that grinds people. This single couplet comes at the end of the prose section on the contemplations, after a long paragraph on the realities; the edition prints it apart under the heading “Beyit” but leaves it out of its list of section headings. Its metre is the four-foot remel.

The poet turns this image around: it is no sorrow if the mill of the heavens falls into ruin, for in it “we” have not a single grain. One who has no wheat to be ground loses nothing when the mill collapses; the dervish who has bound nothing to the world does not fear the world's ruin. The couplet is a short, concrete expression of the description, in the section on the contemplations, of the traveller who does not grieve “even if this world were ruin upon ruin”.

The placement of the couplet is meaningful too: at the end of the heavy prose text on İmâm-ı Rabbânî's stages of sainthood it leaves the reader with a plain and memorable comparison. With no source given, we cannot say whether it belongs to the poet.

Bibliography

Online sources