Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: 11-syllable syllabic metre

Ben ṭatlı cânımdan bezdim uṣandım
Geçmediň cefâdan sen daḫa güzel
Sirişk-i la‘limle ḳana boyandım
Bâri bir inṣaf it baḳ bana güzel

In English

1. I am weary and tired of my own sweet life; still you have not given up your cruelty, my beauty. I am dyed in blood with my ruby-red tears; at least show a little fairness and look at me, my beauty.

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 "uṣandım / boyandım", the second and fourth in the sounds of "daḫa / bana"; "güzel" is the refrain. To whom and on what occasion the poem was composed is not known.

Meaning and Figures of Speech

The quatrain expresses the lover's exhaustion in simple language. In everyday Turkish "tatlı candan bezmek", to weary of one's sweet life, means to be tired of living; the lover has reached this point, yet the beloved has not given up "cefâ", torment. In the third line tears are likened to "la'l", the red precious stone: from much weeping the tears have turned to blood, and the lover is dyed with it. Bloody tears are among the best-known hyperboles of divan poetry. The last line closes with a small request: the lover no longer asks for union, only for fairness and a glance. This shrinking of the request makes the helplessness of the quatrain all the clearer.

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 same entry's list of poems attributed to both poets also includes a koşma with the refrain "usandım"; since the refrain of the koşma in the cönk is "güzel", it could not be determined whether that record refers to this poem. The poem is on page 44 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