Unlike most other living organisms, man, as a social being, does not self-cultivate but is instead molded by the society into which he is born, much like clay in the hands of a sculptor.. The individual is expected to think and behave like the community, to act in concert, and to avoid causing contradiction. Although not written in legal texts like articles of law, beliefs, customs, traditions, and conventions are rules that have been shaped over long processes and must be absolutely obeyed. The death of an individual is a social event, and when it occurs, what is to be done, when, by whom, and how it is to be done is determined by these customs and traditions that rarely change. This study focuses on the manifestations of shrouding (kefenleme), which is one of the burial customs, in the Turkish ghazals (lyric poems) of the 16th-century Ottoman poet Lâmi’î Çelebi. It has been determined that Lâmi’î’s couplets (beyit) refer directly or indirectly, by means of rhetorical devices, to practices and customs such as the shroud being cut from white, cotton fabric, being purchased with the deceased’s own money, the shroud being perfumed with pleasant scents, and martyrs being buried in their bloody clothes. The couplets also reveal that the funeral expenses of those who die alone and without kin were the responsibility of the community, that aid could be requested for this purpose, and that beggars for shroud money existed during the poet’s lifetime. The idiom “kefeni boynunda olmak” (literally, to have one’s shroud around one’s neck), which is used in modern Turkish to mean “to be ready for any hardship, even death, on the path taken or in the cause fought for,” is among the linguistic riches found in the ghazals. The frequency of the word kefen (shroud) was also investigated in other Divans (collected works of a poet), and it was observed that other poets did not favor this word as much as Lâmi’î in randomly selected Divans; it was concluded that the screening of a poet’s works for similar words could help extract meaningful data for making interpretations about their literary personalities, human characteristics, and perspectives on life.

Lâmi’î, Lâmi’î Çelebi, ghazal, burial, shroud.