Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: 11-syllable syllabic metre

‘Ömrüm iḳliminden olduḳ müberrâ
Arada bir derd-i tecellî ḳaldı
Bize böyle diye taḳdîr-i Mevlâ
Anca bu ḥaṭırda tesellî ḳaldı

In English

1. We have become estranged from the clime of life, freed of it; only the pain of a manifestation remains between. Saying that the Lord's decree for us was thus, only in this thought does some consolation remain.

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 "müberrâ / Mevlâ", the second and fourth in "tecellî / tesellî"; "ḳaldı" is the refrain. To whom and on what occasion the poem was composed is not known.

Meaning and Figures of Speech

The quatrain describes a state of age or weariness that has withdrawn from life. "Ömür iklimi", the clime of life, thinks of life as a country; the lover has become "müberrâ", distant and freed, from that country. "Derd-i tecellî" plays on a Sufi term: tecellî is the manifestation of God or of fate; what remains for the lover is the pain this manifestation of fate brings. The last two lines present resignation as consolation: what has happened is the Lord's decree, and one can find comfort only by thinking so. The verb "kaldı" (remained) in the refrain counts what is left after everything has gone and gives the quatrain the air of a final reckoning.

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 "teselli kaldı" 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 46 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