Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: Fâilâtün fâilâtün fâilâtün fâilün

Güller açdıḳça ruḫ-ı zîbâlarıň dört beş bölük
Eksik olmaz bülbül-i şeydâlarıň dört beş bölük

In English

1. As the roses of your lovely cheeks open in four or five clusters, your frenzied nightingales are never lacking, four or five flocks of them.

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 "dört beş bölük"; the rhyme is the "-âlarıň" sound in "zîbâlarıň / şeydâlarıň". 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. For this poem the article cites page 112 of Ahmet Talat's (Onay) 1933 book on Tokatlı Nûrî. To whom and on what occasion the poem was composed is not known.

Meaning and Figures of Speech

The couplet combines the rose and nightingale conceit with a play on numbers. The beloved's cheeks are like roses, and these roses open in "four or five clusters"; around each opening rose gather frenzied nightingales, that is, lovers. The refrain "dört beş bölük" (four or five companies) expresses both abundance and an unruly crowd; the word "bölük", a military term for a company, presents the lovers as an army. The more the beloved's beauty grows, the more her lovers multiply. This numerical formula, close to everyday speech, brings the liveliness of minstrel expression into an aruz poem.

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. For this poem Hakverdioğlu cites page 112 of Ahmet Talat's (Onay) book on Tokatlı Nûrî, where the full text is found. In the article's bibliography the year of this book is given as 1993, while the text itself has 1933; Akman's entry also dates the book to 1933. The poem is on page 23 of the cönk and page 549 of the article.

Bibliography

Academic studies

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Online sources