Original Ottoman Turkish Text

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

Bulmadum ‘âlemde dermân gitdi derd ü hasrete
Hey ne müşkil kâr imiş sabr u tahammül fürkate

In English

1. I found no cure in the world; (my life) went to pain and longing; oh, what a hard task it has turned out to be, patience and endurance in separation. (The first line can also be understood as "I found no cure that would go to (that is, drive away) pain and longing".)

Literary and Historical Commentary

Structure of the Poem

The fifteenth single couplet is written in the "fâ'ilâtün fâ'ilâtün fâ'ilâtün fâ'ilün" pattern. The two lines end with the words "hasrete" and "fürkate". In present-day spelling "-ete" and "-ate" look different; but in the Arabic script both words end in the same letter "t" and the dative suffix, and the difference between back and front vowels is not shown in writing. The couplet can therefore be counted musarra' (both lines rhyming); the rhyme rests on the "-t" sound and the shared suffix. There is no folio mark in the edition; the couplet comes after the [64b] mark in the previous single couplet.

Meaning and Figures of Speech

The couplet describes the pain of separation in the language of medicine. The words "dermân" (cure, remedy), "derd" (illness, pain) and "sabr u tahammül" (patience and endurance) form a tenasüp (congruence of images) arising from the classical idea of love as an illness and the beloved as its only physician. The phrase "dermân gitdi derd ü hasrete" in the first line can be understood in two ways. In the first reading the subject of the verb "gitdi" (went) is an unstated "my life" or "I": the lover found no remedy in the world, and his life passed away in pain and longing. In the second reading "dermân" and "gitdi" join like a relative clause: "I found no remedy that would go to (drive away) pain and longing." We have followed the first reading; the second is more strained in terms of Old Turkish syntax but possible in sense. The second line opens with the exclamation "Hey" and turns into a lament: "sabr u tahammül" (patience and endurance) is advice that sounds easy, but how hard it is in the face of separation is understood only when it is lived. The suffix "imiş" marks this belated understanding, this learning by experience. In the couplet there is both a closeness of sound and an opposition of sense between "derd" (pain) and "dermân" (cure); this creates an interweaving of tezat (antithesis) and cinas (pun). The word "'âlemde" (in the world) shows the breadth of the search: the lover sought a remedy everywhere and found it nowhere. Kılıç sums up the main theme of Şâhî's poems with words such as "ayrılık, fürkat, firâk, hicrân, hasret, hecr" (separation, parting, longing) and draws attention especially to the frequency of "hecr" and "fürkat". The opening couplet of the twelfth ghazal, which he gives as an example, says almost the same thing as this single couplet: "Akıtdı gözlerüm yaşım dûd-ı âteş-i hasret / Eritdi yüregüm yagın ne müşkil derd imiş fürkat". The closeness between "ne müşkil derd imiş fürkat" (what a hard pain separation turns out to be) in the ghazal and "ne müşkil kâr imiş … fürkate" in the single couplet is our own observation; whether the two couplets were written at the same time is not known. Whom this single couplet was written for, whether it speaks to a beloved or to a person from whom the poet is parted, cannot be drawn from the text.

Bibliography

  • Filiz Kılıç (ed.), Şâhî Dîvânı (Şehzâde Bâyezîd), Ankara: T.C. Kültür ve Turizm Bakanlığı Kütüphaneler ve Yayımlar Genel Müdürlüğü, 2018, e-book p. 149, single couplet no. 15 (Millet Library, Ali Emîrî Efendi, Manzum Eserler 225); also p. 31 (main themes, opening couplet of ghazal no. 12), https://ekitap.ktb.gov.tr/Eklenti/59394,sahi-divanipdf.pdf.

Online sources