Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: 11-syllable syllabic metre

Bu sûz-ı ẓulmetden dîvâne göňül
Neyleyim bir kerre âzâd olaydı
Cevriyle yaḳılmış vîrâne göňül
Nâ’il-i vaṣl olup âbâd olaydı

In English

1. This heart, driven mad by the burning of this darkness; what can I do, if only it were set free once. This ruined heart, burned by (the beloved's) cruelty, if only it attained union and were made prosperous again.

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 in "dîvâne / vîrâne", the second and fourth in "âzâd / âbâd"; "olaydı" is the refrain. To whom and on what occasion the poem was composed is not known.

Meaning and Figures of Speech

The quatrain moves through two pairs of opposing images: "dîvâne" (mad) and "âzâd" (free), "vîrâne" (ruined) and "âbâd" (prosperous). The heart that has gone mad longs for freedom, the ruined heart longs to be rebuilt. The expression "vîrâne gönül", which likens the heart to a building or a land, is very common in divan poetry; the fire of love lays waste the city of the heart, and union brings it back to life. "Sûz-ı zulmet", the burning of darkness, evokes both the night of separation and the pain it brings. The verb ending "olaydı" in the refrain is the optative and expresses an unfulfilled wish; for this reason both closing lines of the quatrain read as laments.

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 "âbâd olaydı" 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 42 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