Emotional Reflections of Coffee: From Massieu to Classical Turkish Poetry

Coffee, which originated in Abyssinia in the 9th century, gradually spread across the world following a goatherd’s seen of the energizing effects on his animals after they consumed coffee berries. By the 15th century, the Ottomans had adopted coffee into daily life, and this mysterious beverage eventually entered the palace. In the early 17th century, it reached Europe and acquired a distinctive place in Western literature as an exotic element. The earliest known studies on coffee are attributed to Abū Bakr al-Rāzī, Bengiazlah, and Ibn Sīnā. One of the most notable poems dedicated to coffee in Latin literature is Abbé Guillaume Massieu’s Caffaeum: Carmen. It is known that the poem was read and well received at the Académie des Inscriptions. Until the mid-nineteenth century, Caffeum: Carmen appeared in several other anthologies and in translations into French and Italian.His poem focuses on various aspects of coffee such as its cultivation, storage, preparation, physiological effects, and stimulating qualities. The work was later translated into English by John T. Gilmore under the title Coffee: A Poem. In classical Turkish literature, numerous poems were also written about coffee during the same period. Coffee, with its color, aroma, the period in which it was banned, and its vessels of presentation became the subject of numerous metaphors and similes in classical Turkish poetry as a reflection of daily life. The incorporation of coffee into Ottoman poetry can be regarded as contemporaneous with its integration into Ottoman society. Ottoman poets approached coffee not only in terms of its physical characteristics but also through its emotional and cultural dimensions—associating it with love, longing, spiritual contemplation, and social interaction. This study takes Gilmore’s translation as its source text and analyzes the expressions in Coffee: A Poem in comparison with their counterparts in classical Turkish poetry. The aim is to explore how coffee, as a literary and cultural symbol, is associated with emotional meaning, and to examine how these associations manifest similarly or differently across Western and Ottoman poetic traditions, with Massieu’s poem at the center of this comparative inquiry.