Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: Mefâîlün mefâîlün mefâîlün mefâîlün

Hezâra âhı ġayri ol gül-i ḫandânı çoḳ görmez
Saḥurlarda varıp kûyundaki efgânı çoḳ görmez

In English

1. That laughing rose no longer begrudges the nightingale its sighs; it no longer begrudges the laments the nightingale utters at its door at dawn.

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 refrain is "çoḳ görmez"; the rhyme is the "-ânı" sound in "handânı / efgânı". 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 announces a small change in the relation between the rose and the nightingale. "Gül-i handân", the laughing rose, is the rose in bloom and stands for the beloved; "hezâr", the bird of a thousand songs, is the nightingale and stands for the lover. The rose's no longer "begrudging" the nightingale's sighs means that the beloved now tolerates, perhaps even welcomes, the lover's lament. The word "sahurlar" refers to the hours before dawn; the nightingale's singing toward morning is equated with the lover staying awake until dawn and moaning in the beloved's "kûy", her quarter. The idiom "çok görmez" (does not begrudge) in the refrain comes from everyday speech and gives the couplet a conversational flavour.

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 49 of the cönk and page 550 of the article; its full text is in the cönk itself and has not been published to date.

Bibliography

Online sources