Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Sensin ey cânânım idrâk eyledim cân ‘âleme
Yok yine âlemde senden gayri cânân âleme
Gözlere öyle hayâl-ârâ-yı sevdâsın ki sen
Hep seni tasvîr ider baktıkça insan âleme
Her perî-sîmâya âlem cân atar cânân diye
Sen cemâl-i pâk ile itdikçe cevlân âleme

In English

1. O my beloved, I have come to understand that it is you who are the soul of the world; in the world there is again no beloved of the world but you.

2. You are such an adorner of the image of love in the eyes that whenever one looks at the world, one pictures only you, sees only you.

3. As you move through the world with your pure beauty, the world longs for every fairy-faced beauty, calling each "beloved".

Literary and Historical Commentary

Structure of the Poem

These are three couplets Hüsameddin gives with the words "this too is his". Both lines of the first couplet end with the refrain "âleme" ("to the world") and the rhyme "cân / cânân"; the fragment opens with the matla of a ghazal. The rhyme words of the other couplets are "insan" and "cevlân". How many couplets the ghazal had and its pen-name couplet are not known. Hüsameddin does not state the metre.

Meaning and Figures of Speech

The fragment is given in the same place and along the same line of thought as the previous couplets on the unity of God. The idea that every beauty in the world is the reflection of a single beloved is a widespread theme in Sufi poetry, close to the doctrine of the unity of being (vahdet-i vücûd). In the first couplet the poet says he has "come to understand" that this beloved is the soul of the world. In the second, the eye sees only Him when it looks at the world; in the third, even people's attraction to fairy-faced beauties is taken as a result of that beauty moving through the world. Worldly love is thus interpreted as a shadow of the love directed at the true beloved. That the couplets suit a Sufi reading is shown by Hüsameddin's placing them among the poems on the unity of God; the detailed interpretation is ours.

The refrain word "âleme" occurs in a different context in each couplet and spreads the idea of the world over the whole fragment. There is a cinas (paronomasia) based on the similarity of sound between "cân" (soul) and "cânân" (beloved), and a congruence of images (tenasüp) between "hayâl-ârâ" (adorner of images) and "tasvîr" (picturing), based on the link between picture and image. The phrases "perî-sîmâ" (fairy-faced) and "cemâl-i pâk" (pure beauty) mark the difference between the visible beauty and the beauty that is its source.

Historical Context

Hüsameddin gives these couplets in the section where he says that Nelmî was intensely occupied with Sufism in the last years of his life. In those years Nelmî was living alone in a cell of the Kapancızâde Madrasa in Amasya. For the poet's life see Nelmî (Tahsîn Hasan Efendi).

Bibliography

Online sources