Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: Mef'ûlü mefâîlü mefâîlü feûlün

Bülbül gibi gül ġonca vü şâh-ı emelim yoḳ
Derd-i dili teskîn idecek bir maḥalim yoḳ

In English

1. Like the nightingale, I have no rose, no rosebud and no branch of hope; I have no place where the pain of my heart might be soothed.

Literary and Historical Commentary

Structure of the Poem

The poem is a kalenderî. The kalenderî is one of the forms minstrels composed in aruz and is generally written in the pattern "mef'ûlü mefâîlü mefâîlü feûlün". 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 "yoḳ"; the rhyme is the "-elim / -alim" sound in "emelim / mahalim". 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 makes a striking reversal by depriving the nightingale of its own imagery. In the tradition the nightingale is the bird that perches on the rose branch and sings to the rose; here the lover is like the nightingale, yet he has no rose, no rosebud and no "şâh-ı emel", branch of hope. The bird with no branch to perch on becomes the symbol of the lover with no refuge. The second line says this deprivation plainly: the lover has no "mahal", no place, where his pain might be "teskîn", soothed. The word "yoḳ" (there is not) in the refrain counts a lack in every couplet and gives the poem the air of an inventory of deprivation.

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. Eyüp Akman's entry on Tokatlı Nûrî in the Türk Edebiyatı İsimler Sözlüğü (Dictionary of Names in Turkish Literature), drawing on İbrahim Seçkin Aydın's thesis, reports that a poem with the refrain "mahalim yok" is recorded in the sources under the names of both Erzurumlu Emrah and Tokatlı Nûrî; the response poems (nazire) Nûrî wrote to the poems of his master Emrah have mixed up the two poets' work. The cönk records this poem under Nûrî's name; whether the text in the cönk is the same as the poem Aydın mentions cannot be settled without the full text. The poem is on page 39 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