Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: Fâilâtün fâilâtün fâilâtün fâilün

Aḳdı zülfüň kişveri ruḥṣâre devrân gösterir
Esb-i nâzuň ḫalḳa-i devvâre devrân gösterir

In English

1. The realm of your locks has flowed down toward your cheek; the turning of time shows it. Your steed of coquetry shows a turning within the whirling ring.

Literary and Historical Commentary

Structure of the Poem

The poem is recorded in the cönk as a "dîvân" or "dîvânî". In minstrel literature this name is given to poems composed in aruz, in couplets like the ghazal, and sung to the saz. Because Hakverdioğlu's article publishes only the first verse unit of each poem in the cönk, we know only the opening couplet of this poem. The refrain is "devrân gösterir"; the rhyme is the "-âre" sound in "ruhsâre / devvâre". The identification of the metre is ours; as is usual in the aruz poems of folk poets, some syllables may not fit the pattern exactly. To whom and on what occasion the poem was composed is not known.

Meaning and Figures of Speech

The couplet plays on the senses of the word "devrân". Devran means both the turning of time, fortune, and circling round a ring. In the first line the beloved's hair is thought of as a "kişver", a realm, and this realm has flowed down toward the cheek; the falling of hair over the face is described as a change that time reveals. In the second line "esb-i nâz", the steed of coquetry, likens the beloved's flirtation to a horse; the horse circles within the "halka-i devvâr", a whirling ring. The image evokes both a riding ground and hair curling in rings. The full meaning of the couplet is open to interpretation; our rendering rests on the primary meanings of the words.

Historical Context

The poem is recorded under the name of Tokatlı Nûrî in the Merzifon Cönkü introduced by Metin Hakverdioğlu in 2019; with thirty-six poems, Nûrî is the poet the cönk gives most space to. Drawing on Orhan Bilgin, Hakverdioğlu relates that Eyüb Sabrî of Merzifon often invited Nûrî to Merzifon; Nûrî's weight in the cönk can be explained by this friendship. Since other minstrels also used the pen name Nûrî, it is not certain that every Nûrî poem in the cönk belongs to Tokatlı Nûrî; the article attributes these poems to Tokatlı Nûrî. For the poet's life and his connection with Amasya, see the page on Tokatlı Nûrî. The poem is on page 2 of the cönk and page 549 of the article; its full text is in the cönk itself and has not been published to date.

Bibliography

Online sources