Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: 11-syllable syllabic metre

Felek ṣayısuz odlara yandım
Pervâneniň olsun nâr şimden gerü
Ben âb-ı viṣâle ḳandım boyandım
Baňa bu dert yeter kâr şimden gerü

In English

1. O fate, I have burned in countless fires; from now on let the fire belong to the moth. I have drunk my fill of the water of union and been steeped in it; from now on this sorrow is enough for me, this gain is enough.

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 "yandım / boyandım", the second and fourth in "nâr / kâr"; "şimden gerü" is the refrain. To whom and on what occasion the poem was composed is not known.

Meaning and Figures of Speech

The quatrain is built on the opposition of fire and water. The lover has burned in countless fires and now leaves the fire to the "pervâne", the moth that throws itself into the candle flame and burns. In divan poetry the moth is the symbol of the lover who sacrifices himself for the beloved; here the lover says he hands that role over to the moth. In the second half comes "âb-ı visâl", the water of union: the lover has drunk his fill of it and been steeped in it. The last line counts this experience as a gain: the sorrow endured is now a sufficient "kâr", profit. "Şimden gerü" in the refrain is an old expression of time meaning "from now on". The first line appears to be one syllable short in metre; this may stem from the reading in the article or from the spelling in the cönk.

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 "şimden gerü" 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 5 of the cönk and page 547 of the article; its full text is in the cönk itself and has not been published to date.

Bibliography

Online sources