Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: Mefâ’îlün Mefâ’îlün Fe’ûlün

Yine mestâne çeşmün buldugına
Koma hançer çeküp kan itmek ister

In English

1. Your drunken eye, whomever it finds, again draws a dagger and wants to shed blood; do not let it.

Literary and Historical Commentary

Structure of the Poem

The ninth single couplet is written in the "mefâ'îlün mefâ'îlün fe'ûlün" pattern. There is no rhyme between "buldugına" and "itmek ister"; this is an unrhymed müfred. There is no folio mark in the edition. The word order is unusual: the imperative "Koma" (do not let, do not allow) is placed at the head of the second line, and the main predicate "kan itmek ister" (wants to shed blood) is left to the end. The couplet thus combines, in one sentence, a warning addressed to the beloved and a report of what the eye wants to do.

Meaning and Figures of Speech

In divan poetry the beloved's eye is often likened to a drunken ruffian: it is drunk because it is languid and red, and it holds a dagger because its glances wound the lover. The gamze, the sidelong glance of the eye, is usually imagined as a dagger or an arrow. In this couplet the eye is personified as a drunkard who comes out of the tavern and attacks whoever crosses his path; this is an example of teşhis (personification). A tenasüp (congruence of images) is formed among the words "mestâne" (drunkenly), "hançer" (dagger) and "kan" (blood). The word "yine" (again) presents the eye's aggression as a repeated habit. The lover asks the beloved to restrain her own eye; but beneath this request one also senses the wish to be the target of that glance. "Kan itmek" in Old Turkish means to kill a man; figuratively it describes destroying the lover with a look. Among the single couplets the drunken eye is treated twice: the fourth explains why the eye is drunk, by the wine-lip before it; this one describes the aggression that drunkenness produces. The two couplets are written in the same metre and can be read as two scenes that complete each other; this connection is our own observation.

Historical Context

Whom the couplet was written for is not known. The same image occurs in the opening couplet of the eleventh ghazal, whose full text Kılıç gives in his introduction as an example of the love poems: "Hançer almış ah eline gamze-i dil-dâr mest / Kan itmezse 'acebdür ol gözi hûn-hâr mest". Kılıç counts this ghazal among love poems woven of set expressions within the general framework of divan poetry. The single couplet repeats the ghazal's words "hançer", "mest" and "kan itmek" almost exactly. That the two texts may be attempts on the same ground is our own conjecture.

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. 9 (Millet Library, Ali Emîrî Efendi, Manzum Eserler 225); also p. 40 (full text of ghazal no. 11), https://ekitap.ktb.gov.tr/Eklenti/59394,sahi-divanipdf.pdf.

Online sources