Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: Mefâîlün mefâîlün mefâîlün mefâîlün

Dem-i eşkim töküp âh pâyına yüz sürdügüm demler
Dilerdim yâri Ḥaḳdan ol vaḳit aḫşam ḳarîb olsa

In English

1. In the moments when, shedding my tears of blood and sighing, I rubbed my face at her feet, I would ask God for the beloved; if only evening had been near at that time.

Literary and Historical Commentary

Structure of the Poem

The poem is recorded in the cönk as an aruz semai. The semais minstrels composed in aruz are usually written in the pattern of four "mefâîlün" feet and sung to the saz. Because Hakverdioğlu's article publishes only the first verse unit of each poem in the cönk, we know only the opening couplet of this poem. The first line ends in "demler", the second in "olsa"; no rhyme is formed in the couplet. The identification of the metre is ours; as is usual in the aruz poems of folk poets, some syllables may not fit the pattern exactly. To whom and on what occasion the poem was composed is not known.

Meaning and Figures of Speech

The first line of the couplet sets a scene: the lover, shedding tears and sighing, is rubbing his face at the beloved's feet. Rubbing one's face at someone's feet is an old expression of reverence and devotion; it presents the beloved as sovereign and the lover as servant. The phrase "dem-i eşk" can be read in two ways, "the blood of tears" or "the moment of tears"; in Persian "dem" means both blood and moment. In the second line the lover asks God for the beloved at that moment and wishes that evening were near. In divan and folk poetry evening is the time of meeting and secret converse; the lover wants the hour when he can be alone with the beloved to come as soon as possible. The rhyme of the second line does not match the first; this may suggest that the couplet is not the opening couplet of a semâî but simply its first two lines.

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 poem is on page 41 of the cönk and page 549 of the article; its full text is in the cönk itself and has not been published to date.

Bibliography

Online sources