Original Ottoman Turkish Text

İder âb-ı zülâl-i himmetün bir katreyi deryâ
Nitekim tâb-ı kahrun eyledi bir katre deryâyı

In English

1. The sweet, clear water of your generosity makes a drop into a sea; just as the heat of your wrath made a sea into a drop.

Literary and Historical Commentary

The couplet rests on a reversal set up between its two lines. In the first line the drop becomes a sea, in the second the sea becomes a drop. The same two words, "katre" (drop) and "deryâ" (sea), are repeated with their places exchanged; the old rhetoric calls this kind of expression tard-ı aks. The symmetry brings together the two faces of the person praised: his favour enlarges the small, his wrath diminishes the great. The contrast between "âb-ı zülâl" (sweet, clear water) and "tâb" (heat, fire) completes the image; water multiplies the drop, fire dries up the sea.

The word "himmet" expresses the help and generosity of a great man and suggests that the couplet was taken from a kaside, that is, a poem of praise presented to a statesman or a patron. Kınalızâde confirms this: on the next page he gives the opening couplet of the same kaside. Both couplets rest on the sound "-âyı"; here, though, the rhyme "deryâyı" stands only at the end of the second line, so the couplet comes from the body of the kaside, not from its opening. The anthology does not say to whom the kaside was written. If Kınalızâde's words describing himself as a patron to the poet are taken into account, the person praised may have been the anthologist himself; the text does not say so, and this reading goes no further than a guess.

Şeyhî's other couplets are listed, with an account of his life, in Şeyhî (Tayyibzâde).

Bibliography

Online sources