Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: 11-syllable syllabic metre

Ġarip göňlüm sensiz ârâm eylemez
Ya sen nice iňliyorsuň bensiz yar
Serv-i ḳaddiň görüp ḫırâm eylemez
Ḳalem ḳaşı sîm gerdanı beňsiz yar

In English

1. My forlorn heart finds no rest without you; and you, how do you moan without me, beloved? The cypress, seeing your stature, cannot sway gracefully; O pen-browed beloved whose silver neck is without a mole.

Literary and Historical Commentary

Structure of the Poem

The poem is a koşma. The koşma is the most common verse form of minstrel poetry; it is built of quatrains and usually sung in an eleven-syllable metre. The lines have a caesura after 6+5 or 4+4+3 syllables; the syllable count is ours. Because Hakverdioğlu's article publishes only the first verse unit of each poem in the cönk, we know only the first quatrain of this poem. The first and third lines rhyme on "eylemez", the second and fourth on "bensiz / beňsiz"; "yar" is the refrain, and the rhyme is a pun. To whom and on what occasion the poem was composed is not known.

Meaning and Figures of Speech

The quatrain ends with a pun built on the word "bensiz". In the second line "bensiz" means "without me"; in the fourth line "beňsiz" comes from "ben", a beauty spot on the face or skin, and means "without a mole, unblemished". The same sound carries two meanings and binds the two closing lines of the quatrain together. In the third line the cypress is compared with the beloved's stature: in divan poetry the cypress is likened to the beloved who walks with a swaying gait, but here the cypress, seeing the beloved's stature, is ashamed to sway. "Kalem kaş" is a fine, well-drawn brow; "sîm gerdan" a neck as white as silver. These epithets are also common in folk poetry's descriptions of beauty.

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 "bensiz yâr" 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 37 of the cönk and page 548 of the article; its full text is in the cönk itself and has not been published to date.

Bibliography

Online sources