Ottoman Lyric Poetry: “Those Tulip-Cheeked Ones” and “Row by Row”
Ottoman Lyric Poetry: “Those Tulip-Cheeked Ones” and “Row by Row”
by Necati and Baki
THE LITRARY WORK
Two poems set in late fifteenth and sixteenth-century Turkey; published m manuscript in Ottoman Turkish (untitled) In the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century and in the mid-to- late sixteenth century; in English in 1997.
SYNOPSIS
Necati and Baki use the form of the sonnet-like ghazal to express a traditional ideal of love in ways that reflect Ottoman society and thought.
Events in History at the Time of the Poems
Necati was born in the first half of the fifteenth century, probably somewhere in Eastern Europe. Like many elite members of Ottoman society, he came into the empire as a slave. He was educated and freed, then made his way to Istanbul, where his talents attracted the attention of powerful patrons. In 1481, near the end of the reign of Sultan Mehmed II, called Mehmed the Conqueror (of Constantinople), his poetry won the admiration of the ruler and he received an appointment in the palace bureaucracy. Necati later served as a secretary in the retinue of two royal princes; he died in 1509 as one of the empire’s most popular poets.
The most renowned poet of the latter half of the sixteenth century wrote under the pen name Baki (“the Eternal Enduring,” pronounced “bah-key”). Originally named Mahmud Abdülbaki, he was born in 1526 to the Istanbul family of a humble muezzin (caller-to-prayer). In his youth, Baki was apprenticed either to a saddlemaker or a tender of mosque lanterns. These humble beginnings did not prevent him from receiving an education, which took him through theological school and gained him positions as a professor and prominent judge. His talents at poetry attracted the attention of Sultan Süleyman (the Magnificent and the Lawgiver; r. 1520–1566), after which he became a popular member of the sultan’s inner circle of friends. Baki died in 1600. At the core of his poetry, as well as that of Necati, is a belief in the overwhelming power of love, as interpreted in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Ottoman society.
Events in History at the Time of the Poems
The rise of the Ottomans
In the middle of the eleventh century, a powerful confederation of nomadic Turkic clans from Central Asia known as the Oghuz invaded the heartland of the Islamic Middle East. The mainstream of this invasion seized territories that included present-day Afghanistan, Iran, and Iraq. Establishing themselves in Baghdad in Iraq, the conquerors founded the Muslim Turkic dynasty known as the Great Seljuks (1038–1157). In 1071 the Seljuks defeated a Byzantine Greek army near the town of Malazgirt (Manzikert) in eastern Anatolia (Asia Minor). Afterward, Oghuz clans began to settle in Asia Minor, driving the Byzantines back and establishing a satellite sultanate in the town of Konya, known as the Seljuks of Rum (Anatolia/Asia Minor). The Seljuks of Rum would outlast their Great Seljuk cousins in the East, surviving until just after the devastating Mongol invasions of the mid-thirteenth century.
The Mongol invasion left Asia Minor a shattered region, divided into petty Muslim Turkic princedoms. The westernmost of these princedoms was ruled by the clan of a man called Ertugrul, whose son, Osman, would give rise to the Osmanli dynasty, otherwise known as the “Ottomans.” Initially the Ottoman Turks were a band of raiders; throughout the fourteenth century they expanded to the west, acquiring lands, booty, and subject peoples at the expense of nearby Christian
NO DISGRACE
Slaves came into the Ottoman Empire in various ways, The empire’s military expansion into Eastern Europe brought in a flood of captives, mostly men. Wealthy Ottomans would often purchase them as slave servants, provide them with an education, and later free them to perform a good deed, as recommended by the Islamic faith. Other slaves came from the Ottoman practice of levying on the non-Muslims of the Balkans a tribute of young men in their early teens. These youths were educated, converted to Islam, then trained for service in the professional army (the Janissary corps) as well as the highest administrative offices in the land. It was no disgrace and often a real advantage to be a slave in Ottoman society during Necatt’s day.
Byzantine rivals. Adventuresome young men, drawn by the allure of Holy War for the spread of Islam and by the opportunity to acquire fame and fortune, swelled the Ottoman armies into a tide that flowed from Asia into Europe. By the first half of the fifteenth century, this tide had turned the Byzantine capital of Constantinople into an island in a sea of Muslim territories. Although disoriented by a 1402 defeat at the hands of the Byzantine leader Timur (or Tamburlaine), the Ottomans soon recovered and resumed their advance. In 1453, under the young Ottoman sultan Mehmed II, they besieged and finally conquered Constantinople.
With the acquisition of one of the world’s great urban centers, Ottoman aspirations to empire flourished. Mehmed rebuilt Constantinople (which the Ottomans called Istanbul), making it his own capital, and began to re-establish it as a hub of commerce and culture. From the midfifteenth through the sixteenth centuries, the Ottoman Empire underwent stunning expansion. Mehmed subdued the remaining post-Seljuk Muslim Turkish principalities of Asia Minor and made the Black Sea an Ottoman lake. His grandson Selim I (r. 1512–20) expanded Ottoman domination to Syria, Egypt, and the Hejaz (western Arab Peninsula, where the holy cities of Mecca and Medina are located). Under Mehmed’s great-grandson Süleyman (r. 1520–66), the Ottomans conquered the remaining sovereign rulers of the Balkans and Hungary. Ottoman rule had by that time extended northwest to the gates of Vienna; the Ottomans held sway over much of the North African coast, and dominated the Mediterranean Sea. During the sixteenth century, there was even an official position in the palace bureaucracy for a poet who versified the conquests of the sultans.
The first flowering of Ottoman Turkish literature among the empire’s elites occurred during what historians call “the long sixteenth century,” which stretched from the last quarter of the fifteenth through the initial quarter of the seventeenth century. Poets abounded in all the major cities of the empire at the time, especially the capital.
Europe and the Middle East at the height of Ottoman rule
The long sixteenth century was a period of tumultuous artistic, intellectual, and social change in the Mediterranean world. In 1492 Christopher Columbus made his momentous “discovery” of the Americas and Spain carried out the final days of its Reconquista (the Christian reconquest of Muslim Spain). In these final days, the Catholic rulers of Spain began a series of expulsions of Jews and Muslims from their lands, exiling the remnant of a once vibrant Arab-Hebrew-Spanish culture. This series of expulsions was one of the first major steps in carving out ethnic national states, each with its own national language, from Europe’s large multicultural, multiethnic empires. Along with the Islamic exiles, many of the Spanish Jewish refugees were welcomed into the Muslim Ottoman Empire, which remained multiethnic. These Jewish refugees established thriving communities and served as physicians, translators, financiers, and traders under Ottoman rule. Mehmed’s son Bayezid II is said to have thanked the Spanish for some of his most valuable citizens.
Both Ottoman and European culture flourished in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This was the late Renaissance period in Europe, which began with a brilliant burgeoning of Italian art and literature produced by such artistic giants as Leonardo Da Vinci (1492–1519), Michelangelo (1475–1564), and Benvenuto Cellini (1500–71). Mehmed II had the celebrated Gentile Bellini (1429?–1507) brought to Istanbul to have a portrait of himself painted in the Italian style. Among other literary marvels of the age were the Petrarchan poets, the boldly satirical writer Aretino, and brilliant women writers, from Veronica Franco to Gaspara Stampa and Tullia d’Aragona. This was also a golden age of Ottoman poetry, the time of the master male poets Necati, Zati, Hayali, Yahya the Janissary, and Baki, as well as the famed female poets, Zeynep, Mihri, and Hubbi.
Religion too underwent innovation and transformation in such a fecund climate, both in Western Europe and Ottoman Eurasia. The spiritual hegemony of the Roman Catholic Church was broken in the early 1500s, when the reforms attempted by Martin Luther led to the founding of Protestant Christianity. Disgruntled Protestant peasants in Germany considered inviting Ottoman rule, thinking they would be treated fairly and allowed to worship as they wished under it. But the Muslim world was experiencing religious conflicts of its own. Early in the sixteenth century, Ismail the Safavid, the heir of a powerful Shi’ite family (see sidebar), began to take control of Iranian territories in the East and to challenge Ottoman power in Anatolia, where many inhabitants had sympathies with the Shrite faction of the Muslim religion.
Politically Europe saw the long reigns of young, powerful, ambitious rulers: Henry VIII of England (r. 1509–47), Francis I of France (r. 1515–47), Charles V of Spain and the Holy Roman Empire (r. 1516–56), and Suleyman, sultan of the Ottomans (r. 1520–66). The climate of change in which they ruled was widely perceived as the end of a familiar world and to many seemed to presage the end of time. Apocalyptic speculation was rampant. A variety of Christians and Muslims—the seers, astrologers, and geomancers—as well as Jewish kabbalists (practitioners of Jewish mysticism) predicted the coming of an invincible universal ruler. The belief was that he would unite the world under one religion, either as the Messiah (mahdi in Islamic lore) or a commander-in-chief who would prepare the world for the coming of the Messiah. Although there were several contenders for the role, most prognostications favored either the Holy Roman Emperor Charles or the Ottoman ruler Süleyman. Surprisingly, a number of European Christians were convinced that Süleyman would be the ultimate victor. By the same token were Muslims who believed that Jesus would be the long awaited Messiah.
In sum, in a period when the world seemed in flux, poised (as we know now) on the threshold of modernity, absolute monarchs dominated Europe and the Middle East. Their power, wealth, and glory made them seem God-like or like agents of God. It appeared that all benefits flowed from their good will, disaster from their anger. In such an age, for poets within the Ottoman sphere of influence, the expression of love, no matter how hot and physical it might seem, always implied love for the ruler, which implied the love of God. This is something to keep in mind when reading early-modern love poetry, be it Ottoman or European.
SUNNAH AND SHI‘AH
The great ideological split between Sunnah and shi‘ah has its roots in a conflict about who was to be heir to the Prophet Muhammad’s leadership of the Islamic community. Those who believed the mantle of leadership had passed to the Prophet’s son-m-law Ali and his descendants called themselves the Party (Arabic shi’ah) of Ali and became known as Shtites. Those who believed in the legitimacy of the successors chosen by the Muslim community after Muhammad’s death and in the supremacy of the sayings and practices (sunnah in Arabic) of the Prophet became known as Sunnis.
Poets and patrons
Scholars have recently made the observation, with regard to Renaissance England, that in early modern times the “supposedly “private” sphere of love can be imagined only through its similarities and dissimilarities to the public world of the court” (Jones and Stallybrass, p. 54). This was as true of the Ottoman court as of the English court under the Tudor monarchs. Even more than his European counterparts, the Ottoman sultan was the sole locus of power. There was no competing faction of hereditary nobility to challenge him; the Ottoman family was the only family that could rule legitimately. During the height of Ottoman power, a son who succeeded his father would have all his brothers and their offspring killed so that there would be no hereditary claimants to the throne except for his own sons. The most powerful men among the sultan’s administrators, underlings, and standing army were slaves.
For the Ottoman elites (both free and slave), power, position, preferment, wealth, and even life were controlled by the ruler and granted by his benevolence. The court-dependent elites were bound to the ruler and the ruler’s surrogates by ties that went beyond simple loyalty. These were ties that were traditionally described in the language of love. Even the panegyric kaside (Arabic: qasidah), or poem of praise, seemed often to be an extended love poem.
Until the late sixteenth century, when Süleyman regularized the system of appointments to the educational system and bureaucracy, successful poets could count on lucrative jobs doled out by their patrons often as a reward for lavish poems of praise that not only extolled the patron’s virtues but often asked for some specific gift or position. These Ottoman poets, whether of humble or better birth, identified with elite society. They frequented the salons of the powerful, relied on the gifts of their patrons, and often sought paying posts in the administrative or the military bureaucracy. In this climate, any poem of love could be understood as an appeal to the ruler or patron. The counterpart to praise was the threat of scathing lampoons or satires, in which a disappointed poet might hold a powerful figure up to public ridicule with the crudest insults couched in the most elegant poetic style. But the closer to power a poet was, the more precarious his position: a satirical verse at the wrong time might result in his execution; a paying position might be taken away at a patron’s whim.
Being a master poet implied that a person could read and write and was skilled in polite conversation. These were qualities valued at court. The biographies of poets tell how Necati caught the eye of Sultan Mehmed II with a poem. It appears that the poet had a friend who was one of the sultan’s companions. This man, likely an elite slave, was often summoned to play chess with the ruler. One day he went to his chess game armed with a ghazal by Necati written on a scrap of paper jutting from the folds of his turban. Spotting the paper, the sultan was intrigued and asked to read the poem, which greatly impressed him. He inquired after the poet’s name, then awarded him a secretarial position at a wage of 17 silver pieces a day. In other words, attracting the attention of the royal beloved or wealthy patron had very practical benefits. Patrons liked taking into their service someone willing to suffer countless torments (emotional or other types) and endure hopeless longing for them.
There were other ways besides patronage to become a successful poet in Ottoman society. Zati, a contemporary of Baki, refused patronage positions and kept a fortuneteller’s shop in the bazaar, ghostwriting love poems for would-be suitors and accepting the gifts of wealthy admirers. Another contemporary, Hayali, started out as a street urchin in the provinces, traveled to Istanbul with a group of wandering mystics, attracted the attention of powerful figures with his poetry, and ended up as a provincial governor.
Although Ottoman poets competed to attract the attention of the highest echelons of society, the subject matter of poems, indeed many poetic expressions and attitudes, seeped into wider urban society. Poets such as Necati and Baki frequented coffeehouses, millet beer halls, pudding shops, public baths, taverns, and merchants’ stores, where they came in contact with many ordinary people. In fact, it was common for a beloved to be part of the non-elite population; poets courted attractive shop boys with elite, high-culture love poems. Lovers who were unable to write their own poetry even paid well-known poets to compose seductive verses to a beloved for them. Popular songs repeated lines of elite poetry and a class of urban folk poets appeared who moved easily between the styles and rhythms of folk poetry and simplified elite verse. In such ways, society as a whole shared some core themes of love, passionate faith, and entertainment, which echoed through Ottoman lands.
Ottoman society—urban entertainment culture
Throughout the early modern period, the central city of Istanbul was home to a lively entertainment culture that revolved around taverns, coffeehouses, country excursions, holiday festivals, the salons of courtiers, and the gardens of private homes. Just to the north of the central city, across the inlet of the Golden Horn, was the suburb of Galata, home to the European trading colonies. The villas of the wealthy dotted shores of these colonies, and many Muslim dervish lodges (communal dwellings of the mystical orders) were situated in them too. Although Islam forbade Muslims from drinking wine, in Galata, non-Muslims (Italian Christians and Jews) ran popular taverns that sold wine to roistering Muslim poets and their friends. Love relationships abounded, with the object of a man’s affection not necessarily being a woman. During early modern times in the Ottoman Empire as well as in Europe, upper-class families protected their women from public exposure; consequently literary love among the cultural elites was often homoerotic and sexual relations between men and boys were common. So Ottoman poets sang the beauties of popular shop boys, dancing boys, tavern waiters, young Janissary soldiers, roguish street urchins, and, in some cases, “public” women such as non-Muslims, prostitutes, and gypsy dancers. At the time there was no category of thought corresponding to what we call “homosexuality”; in fact, there were no sexual categories. Attraction to boys or to women was considered a preference. The authorities, both religious and civil, might approve of a man’s love for a boy when it was part of the mystical spirituality of elite culture, tolerate it when carried on privately, or condemn it when it offended the morality of the public, but they did not conceive of it as fundamentally different from other practices. It was even thought more “manly” among Ottoman elites to have a general preference for boys. In the end, however, the Turkish language does not indicate gender, so the beloved is always in some sense ambiguous. As any broad survey of Ottoman poems shows, the boundaries of love—between the desirable boy, the beloved friend, the adored patron, the mystical master—were always hazy and shifting.
There was in fact plenty of occasion for fraternizing with other men or with the public variety of women. Istanbul often saw gala public entertainments. During the great feasts, especially the Feast of Sacrifice (celebrating Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his beloved son Isaac) and the Fast-Breaking Feast after Ramadan (the month of fasting), the people frequented great carnivals, complete with rides such as a wooden Ferris wheel and swings, and performers such as acrobats, strongmen, musicians, jugglers, magicians, and puppeteers. The circumcision of a royal prince would be the occasion for weeks of celebration, including huge parades, fireworks, and pageants on the water. Any of these occasions gave lovers the opportunity to flirt with a beloved.
POPULAR POETRY
The poetry of the elites was by no means the only variety of Turkish poetry Throughout Ottoman times there existed a large and lively tradition of popular poetry. Whereas the elite poetry used Persian forms and rhythms and a vocabulary full of Persian and Arabic words, the popular poetry invoked the Turkish of daily speech. The best-known group of popular poets, minstrels—generally called aşiks, or “lovers—took the role of wanderers who moved from village to village, spreading love poetry throughout the world as they sought a beloved seen only in a dream. Some aşiks wrote in both the elite and popular forms, creating a bridge in their poetry over which language and ideas moved between the elites and the larger population.
Dervish groups in society
Common to the observance of Islam are everyday prayers, communal duties, and religious obligations derived from the Quran and the way in which the Prophet Muhammad practiced the faith. Parallel to the ordinary practice of religion were the beliefs and activities of Muslim mystics, known as “dervishes” or “Sufis.” Mysticism, or Sufism, exerted a strong attraction among the general population, promising an immediate, intense, emotional experience of contact with the Divine. There existed in Ottoman times widespread and influential networks of dervish orders. They attracted both devotees who planned to dedicate their lives to mystical discipline and lay adherents from all walks of life. These lay adherents participated in dervish rituals and ceremonies but carried on ordinary lives outside the dervish lodges. The rituals performed by Sufis ranged from the sedate whirling dance of the Mevlevi dervishes, to the collective chanting, leaping, spinning, and purportedly painless self-mutilation practiced by more extreme groups. There were ritualistic, formalized wine-party-style ceremonies with a mystical master as the “beloved” and there were drunken orgies with beautiful boys. In larger Islamic society, dervish influences were felt everywhere. Each corps of the standing army had a resident dervish master, and craft or artistic guilds would attach themselves to dervish lodges. Given its reliance on direct, emotional experience of the Divine, dervish mysticism was an important bridge by which many of the conquered peoples converted to Islam.
The understanding of Islamic mysticism varied widely. One strain took a highly refined, philosophical approach that intersected in some respects with European neo-Platonism (the philosophy of Plato that considers ideal forms to be real and existing forms to be an imperfect, temporary reflection of reality). According to the members of this strain, the only true reality is on the ideal plane where all existence is essentially unified and subsumed in the being of God. Everything else is illusory, including the sense we have of a self that is individual and separate from the Divine Unity. The project of the mystic is to get beyond the illusion of the self and to be re-immersed in the primal Unity.
Another strain of Sufism was manifested in the personal morality of shaven, dirty, wandering dervishes, who rejected all the outward practices of Islam in favour of the truth of Divine Unity, to which only a select group was privy. Belief in this esoteric truth manifested itself in popular ecstatic rituals and in legends of holy dervishes who performed miracles of mastery over the physical world. Since a dervish master, thought many, could act on the ideal plane of Unity, he was not subject to the constraints of time and space that rule the physical (illusory) world. The master could be praying on his prayer rug in a dervish lodge in Turkey and at the same moment be seen in Mecca praying in the Holy Kaaba. Out of such reports came the popular legends of flying carpets.
By convention the Ottoman poet would routinely take on the persona of a mystic/Sufi. It follows that in the Ottoman poems by elite writers, passionate love of this world’s beloved and drunkenness with this world’s wine are no more than bridges to blessed intoxication with Divine Love.
The Poems in Focus
The contents—an overview
Ottoman elite poets collected and published their works in handwritten volumes called divans. Thus, Turkish literary historians refer to poets of the Ottoman elite tradition as “divan poets.” A typical divan might contain panegyric (praise) poems—to God, to Muhammad, to the sultan, and to various other powerful people. Also in the divan could be a large number of ghazals, stanza poems, fragments, individual lines, and couplets. While some of the poems for special occasions have descriptive headings such as “In Praise of the Glorious Sultan,” most poems are listed in alphabetic order by the last letter of the rhyme.
The number of poems in a typical divan could run from a few hundred to more than a thousand. Necati’s established divan contains 650 ghazals Baki’s, 548. Some of the recurring elements of Ottoman love poetry are a beloved, a melancholy lover, a garden (or tavern), a party with wine, and close friends. It is important to keep in mind that every Ottoman poem is full of references that needed only to be hinted at in passing because Ottoman audiences knew them so well.
A ghazal by Necati
The full contents of Necati’s “Those Tulip-Cheeked Ones” is rendered in English below, followed by a detailed explication.
“This Text has been suppressed due to author restrictions.”
In Necati’s poem, as in all such poems, the beloved and the garden come to represent each other. The first couplet makes the beloved’s cheek into a tulip; the beloved’s body is a cypress; the hair, a hyacinth; the mouth, a rosebud. When the beloved appears in the garden, the cypress tree is abashed at the sight of the more beautiful cypress that is the beloved’s body; the tree dares not sway in competition with this body. Likewise, the rose dares not blossom in the presence of the beloved’s mouth, which, by smiling, blossoms. The garden is the beloved; the beloved, the garden.
THE GHAZAL
Although other subjects may be addressed in a ghazal, it is primarily a poem of love, either interpersonal or spiritual. The length of a ghazal may vary, but most commonly it is a short poem of five to seven couplets, with the pen name of the poet worked into the final couplet The ghazal is written in monorhyme; that is, it has the same rhyme throughout, on the pattern aa ba ca da and so forth.
In the second couplet, the garden is both the place where a party is held and an image of the party itself. The garden-party of Ottoman poems has slender cypress-like bodies; tulip cups of ruddy wine; beloved friends, inebriated and blossoming like roses; nightingale poets. Beloveds are likened to the shining face of the moon or a bright scented candle that draws lover-moths to their doom. In this couplet, the gathering of intimate friends rejects the “wild tulip,” who is like a rustic Turkic tribesman from the hinterlands and not the kind of refined and elegant companion that an Ottoman gentleman (or garden) would prefer. For an Ottoman, the garden represents the ultimate in safety and security. In the privacy of a garden a man can put off the formal attire and manners of public life, relax, and be honestly himself amid the beauties of nature and close friends.
By the third couplet we have been introduced to the garden and the party of intimate friends. Now we jump to party conversation. The poet boasts to his friends of the torments he has suffered at the hands of beautiful beloveds.
The fourth couplet refers to a commonplace early-modern notion also seen in European poetry. Love is inflicted on the hapless lover as the beloved’s glances pierce his heart. Thus, the beloved’s eyebrows are depicted as bows, and from this an Ottoman reader would recognize that the eyelashes are arrows shot by a glance at the lover, who is always in great danger of being killed by love.
The fifth couplet mentions Joseph, the biblical character whose story is also told in the Quran. In Islamic lore, Joseph is the paragon of male beauty and male chastity. There is a play in this line on the word sold. It refers to the fact that Joseph was sold by his brothers into slavery but also refers (negatively) to a beloved who “sells” him or herself by being visible in public. The idea is that there are many beauties out there who are not public beauties.
Next we return to the party and the one beloved who brings a cure to the poet/speaker for the torments of love. This is the “saki” or wine server, who helps the party goers pass from the intoxicating torment of love into the oblivion of drunkenness.
In the end, the poet comforts himself with a concluding bit of wisdom for the love-plagued: “Have patience; everyone suffers from love.”
A ghazal by Baki
The full contents of Baki’s “Row by Row” is rendered in English below, followed by a detailed explication.
“This Text has been suppressed due to author restrictions.”
Baki’s poem has a peculiar rhyme element that the Ottoman poets loved. It is called redif, which in Arabic means the person who rides to battle on the back of another person’s saddle. In poetry it means a word or phrase that repeats after the rhyme letter, in the above poem “saf saf” meaning “row by row.” This gives the poem a unifying theme, allowing the poet to jump from topic to topic as things in rows remind him of his beloved and his life as a lover.
Baki’s first couplet references the eyelashes in somewhat the same context as Necati’s poem, but here they are not arrows. They are the lances of the Ottoman feudal cavalry lined up in battle formation for an assault on the heart of the lover. This very military image would make an Ottoman audience suspect the beloved is the ruler or a patron.
In the second couplet the cypresses line up to watch the beloved in exactly the way that the various groups of dignitaries would line up in rows to greet the sultan on formal occasions.
Next the poet embarks on a series of exaggerated depictions of the depth of his passionate devotion. He pictures himself standing at the seashore weeping for his beloved, and he imagines the rows of waves pounding the shore as phalanxes of soldiers resisting the torrent of tears that pour from his eyes.
In the fourth couplet, the poet sees a flock of migrating cranes in the sky. Turkish folk mythology has it that cranes flying with mournful cries are really the souls of the dead ascending to paradise. So the poet points out to his beloved that these are not cranes at all but his heart and soul flying to the one he loves. This is the ultimate devotion, a devotion that mirrors the desire of the soul to return to its divine origin.
Even in the mosque, the lover is focused on his beloved. In a very down-to-earth image, like the water-seller who roams the ranks of worshippers, the tear-filled eye forsakes its devotions as it jealously wanders the rows to see with whom the beloved might be praying. Behind this seemingly very secular image lies the notion that the true, mystical worshipper turns from the mundane devotions of the mosque to a direct, emotional connection to the Divine-as-beloved. The audiences of Ottoman poetry understood that those who know the secret of mystical love are “people of the heart.” And the secret is that the pain and suffering doled out by the beloved is the most wonderful of gifts—because it causes the lover to give up selfish desires, to die to this fragmented world and awaken to the world of Divine Unity.
The poem moves to images of the beloved’s lovers. The guests at the sultan’s table in the sixth couplet are his devoted lovers—the administrative, legal, and educational elite who gather in the palace courtyard on formal occasions.
In the seventh couplet, we turn to the work of a poet and another battle image. As the poet writes, the pen sways like the battle standards of troops, who fall into line like the lines of verse that arrange themselves on the page. Then the Holy Shrine of the Kaaba in Mecca is surrounded by a portico supported by columns, which stand like devoted (and respectful) lovers around the beloved.
Like every ghazal, the poem ends addressing the poet by name. The poet customarily praises his own abilities. Here Baki evokes the image of intimate friends standing row by row before his dead body as they recount his virtues.
From courtly love to Sufi love
The business of the Ottoman state was warfare. Each spring the army set out to expand the borders of Islam and drive non-Muslims further back into Europe. New lands, new fiefs, and new taxes fed the voracious appetite of the expanding empire. Given this state of affairs, armies and the panoply of war were never too far from the awareness of even the most refined poet or lover. Indeed the connection between a poem’s beloved and the concerns of the Ottoman court is famously evident in Baki’s ghazal, in which the beloved’s lashes are compared to a cohort of the feudal cavalry. Other court connections surface in the poem too. Swaying cypresses line the beloved’s path, evoking not only the garden but also the slave pages of the palace, who serve the ruler and train for high administrative positions. The business of the writer is linked to the military effort in the image of the poet’s madly scribbling reed pen as a battle standard waving in the heat of combat.
Ottoman poets and their audiences understood that love was of two types—real and metaphoric. To them, “metaphoric love” meant the love that is aroused by worldly objects: the sultan, a patron, a beautiful boy, a lovely woman, a beloved friend, a mystical master. These loves are “metaphoric” because people who really know about these things realize that the highest and best use of worldly love is as a bridge to “real love,” which is love of the Divine.
In Sufism, actual love, love in the world, is seen as a metaphor for “real” love, longing for return to unity with the Divine. The lover, separated from the ultimate object of desire, seeks to cast off all ties to the self and the multiplicity of the world we perceive with our senses. The extreme melancholy, the torment, the weeping that we see in the poems are only “the blessings of grief and pain” that the beloved bestows as a lesson, in an attempt to convince the lover to die to the self and be reborn in Divine Unity.
The ruling metaphors of Sufism were those of love and intoxication. Like the extreme ecstasy of unfulfilled desire, the intoxication of the wine drinker is seen as a bridge to the joyous experience of spiritual reunion. The beautiful saki (wine server, a potential beloved) holds out a double remedy for attachment to this treacherous world: the intoxication to be derived from passion and from wine.
Sources and literary context
The Ottomans saw themselves as stewards of the Islamic community, politically, religiously, and culturally. This cultural tradition included, among many things, the Arabic and Persian literary traditions. Literary works included histories and chronicles in both prose and verse, popular stories and legends in the tradition of The Arabian Nights (also in WLAIT 6: Middle Eastern Literatures and Their Times). There were also saints’ tales, travel accounts, and scientific, religious, and philosophical works. Most popular in all three societies, however, was the medium of poetry. The basic elements of Ottoman poetry—the beloved, the garden, the wine party, the group of friends, and the melancholy lover—hark back to a long tradition of Arabic and Persian love poetry.
Ghazal poetry descends directly from the Persian literary tradition. In fact, Ottoman poets often wrote in Persian as well as Turkish. The Persian masters produced a vast corpus of not only love poems and poems of praise but also narrative poems about legendary lovers such as Leyla and Mejnun . Ottoman poets saw the Persian masters—Firdawsi (The Shahnamah) , Jalal al-Din Rumi (The Spiritual Couplets) , and Hafiz (The Divan of Hafiz) —as models and were sensitive to the literary fashions of the Persian-speaking world (all also in WLAIT 6: Middle Eastern Literatures and Their Times).
THE INVISIBLE FEMALE
Public life in the Ottoman Empire—and to only a slightly lesser extent in Europe—was predominantly mate. Only lower-class women had any public presence. “Respectable” women went about heavily veiled and accompanied by protective retinues, if they went out at all. Even the powerful women in the sultan’s harem, who had huge stipends and intrigued with high officials to promote the interests of their offspring, had to conduct their public business through male intermediaries. Literary production too was overwhelmingly male. Among the hundreds of noted fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Ottoman poets, less than a handful were women. The poet Mihri (d. 1512), for example, was educated by a doting father who had no sons to promote. She led a highly unusual public life, tied to the literary circles in the court of an Ottoman prince in her home town of Amasya, Her poetry—submitted to the court by male intermediaries—brought Mihri substantial cash rewards from the prince/sultan. But in most cases, women were invisible, their influence and talents unknown.
However, the Ottomans were closely attentive to the styles and fashions of their fellow Ottoman poets as well. By writing “parallel poems” (poems repeating the rhyme, rhythm, and themes of previous poems), they both competed with one another and reinforced the styles of popular master poets. A famed poet such as Baki, for example, would be imitated by numerous poets over hundreds of years, who thereby maintained his style as part of the perceived tradition. Given this concern for tradition and continuity, there were no radical changes in Ottoman poetry in more than 500 years. In fact, when radical literary change did occur in the nineteenth century, it meant abandonment of the Ottoman tradition and a turn toward a more Europeanized modern literature.
Impact
Beginning in the sixteenth century, the Ottomans developed their own version of a “biographies of poets” genre, which had precedents in Persian and Arabic letters. The authors of these accounts gave information about the poets’ lives and often critiqued their poetry. It is clear from these biographies that the generation that followed Necati considered him the poet in whose work the use of Ottoman Turkish rose from the speech of rude tribesmen and nomads to a poetic language on a par with Arabic and Persian. The biographies also reveal that Baki attained the title “sultan of poets” and won wide renown during his lifetime.
Both Necati and Baki are foundational Ottoman poets. Turkish students today struggle through some of their poems, likely the very poems discussed above, much as students in Great Britain might struggle through Old or Middle English verse. Even Turkey’s most modernist poets make gestures of respect to these ancient masters, as shown in the following translation of a quatrain by a well-known living poet:
Oh master of glances, hero of hopes
You described the indescribable in a rose.
As we began to grieve, we were your
apprentices
The Divan of Baki is the birds you put to
flight
(Hilmi Yavuz in Silay, p. 510)
—Walter G. Andrews and Joyce Moss
For More Information
Andrews, Walter G. Poetry’s Voice, Society’s Song. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1985.
Andrews, Walter G., Dana Bates, and Mehmet Kalpakli, eds. Ottoman Lyric Poetry: An Anthology. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997.
Davison, Roderic H. Turkey: A Short History. Beverley: Eothen, 1981.
Gibb, E. J. W. A History of Ottoman Poetry. Vols. 1–6. London: Luzac, 1900–1906.
Holbrook, Victoria Rowe. The Unreadable Shores of Love. Austin: The University of Texas Press, 1994.
Jones, Ann Rosalind, and Peter Stallybrass. “The Politics of Astrophel and Stella” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, vol. 24, no. 1 (winter 1984): 53–68.
Silay, Kemal, ed. An Anthology of Turkish Literature. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Turkish Studies, 1996.