Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: Mefâîlün mefâîlün mefâîlün mefâîlün

Ferâġat eyle gel göňlüm ümîd-i vaṣf-ı dilberden
Bilürsin ki vefâ gelmez cihân içre güzellerden

In English

1. Come, my heart, give up hoping for faithfulness from the beloved; you know that in this world no faithfulness comes from the fair.

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 rhyme is the "-erden" sound in "dilberden / güzellerden". 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 couplet states, in the form of advice, the idea often treated in minstrel and divan poetry that "there is no faithfulness in the fair". The lover addresses his own heart and asks it to practise "ferâgat", renunciation. In the article's reading the phrase "ümîd-i vasf-ı dilber" gives the sense "the hope of praising the beloved"; but in view of the word "vefâ" (faithfulness) in the second line, the reading "ümîd-i vasl-ı dilber", "the hope of union with the beloved", seems more fitting. The rendering above follows this second possibility. The language of the couplet is plain and gives its advice as a general maxim.

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