Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: Fâ’ilâtün Fâ’ilâtün Fâ’ilâtün Fâ’ilün

Gözlemekden yollarun pür-hûn olupdur gözlerüm
Nitekim cânum bedendedür sini ben gözlerüm

In English

1. From watching your roads my eyes have become full of blood; as long as my soul remains in my body, I watch for you.

Literary and Historical Commentary

Structure of the Poem

The twelfth single couplet is written in the "fâ'ilâtün fâ'ilâtün fâ'ilâtün fâ'ilün" pattern. The couplet is musarra' (both lines rhyme), and both lines end in the same word, "gözlerüm". In the two lines, however, the word carries two different meanings: in the first "gözlerim" (my eyes, the plural of göz with a possessive suffix), in the second "gözlerim" (I watch, I wait, the aorist of the verb gözlemek). The use of two words that are written and pronounced alike but differ in meaning is a full cinas (pun), and the rhyme rests on this cinas. There is no folio mark in the edition.

Meaning and Figures of Speech

The couplet takes up the common divan theme of "watching the road". The lover waiting for the beloved's arrival does not take his eyes from the road; long waiting, sleeplessness and tears stain his eyes with blood. In classical poetry bloody tears are among the best-known signs of the pain of love. The second line sets the length of this waiting: as long as the soul stays in the body, that is, as long as the lover lives. The word "nitekim" is used not in its present-day sense ("indeed, as a matter of fact") but in the Old Anatolian Turkish sense of "just as, since, as long as"; taking the line as "as long as my soul is in my body" is, in our view, the most fitting rendering of this usage. The fourfold repetition of the root "göz" (eye) (gözlemekden, gözlerüm, gözlerüm and the verb in the second line) gives the couplet a weave of iştikak (derivation from a common root). The first line tells the result of the waiting, the second its continuity; pain is joined to a devotion that admits no return. The image of the bloodied eye recurs in the single couplets: in the seventeenth "gözüm giryân" (my eye weeping) and "ciger hûn" (my liver blood) stand side by side. Here, however, the blood is the result not of weeping but of long watching; this small difference is the couplet's invention. In the divan, especially in poems addressed to the beloved and to the father, watching the road and waiting for news are frequent themes; Kılıç reads such couplets as the voice of a son waiting for a letter from his father. Nothing in the couplet or the edition places this single couplet in that frame; it can equally be read as a general love couplet.

Bibliography

  • Filiz Kılıç (ed.), Şâhî Dîvânı (Şehzâde Bâyezîd), Ankara: T.C. Kültür ve Turizm Bakanlığı Kütüphaneler ve Yayımlar Genel Müdürlüğü, 2018, e-book p. 148, single couplet no. 12 (Millet Library, Ali Emîrî Efendi, Manzum Eserler 225); also p. 32 (the theme of the son waiting for news from his father), https://ekitap.ktb.gov.tr/Eklenti/59394,sahi-divanipdf.pdf.

Online sources