The Rubayat of Omar Khayyam

One early morning, as I left home for school, in the late winter or early spring of 1963 or ‘64 I found small book, bound in soft, brown suede leather lying on the ground just outside our back yard fence. It was lying on top of, not in, the mud. I picked it up. It was no larger than my hand. On the cover, in gold coloured lettering were the words, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. I had never heard of this book before that moment.

I opened it and on the first page I saw the title again followed by the words Translated by Edward Fitzgerald. 

I turned the page to find that each page contained 3 verses or as I eventually came to know them – quatrains. Three quatrains on the verso page and three on the recto. 

“AWAKE ! for Morning in the Bowl of Night

Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight:

And Lo ! the Hunter of the East has caught

The Sultan's Turret in a Noose of Light.”

These were the first words I read of this little book that, unbeknown to me at that moment, was to change my life. 

I had already developed a fondness for Shakespearean language as the result of a particularly enlightened high school English teacher so the poetry I encountered in The Rubaiyat didn’t intimidate me. At least it didn’t intimidate me as language. As a philosophy or an aggregation of thought it was so new, even confronting, to my 15 year old self that it was pretty intimidating indeed. 

The only philosophy I had any familiarity with was Christianity and by the time I read the 7th quatrain I was pretty sure this Rubaiyat thing wasn’t in the least concerned with an afterlife or sobriety or repentance. All three of which were omnipresent themes, if not obsessions, in the sermons I heard from my father’s pulpit every Sunday. 

“Come, fill the Cup, and in the Fire of Spring

The Winter Garment of Repentance fling:

The Bird of Time has but a little way

To fly - and Lo! the Bird is on the Wing.”

This was heady stuff. 

And then quatrain 11.

“Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,

A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse - and Thou

Beside me singing in the Wilderness -

And Wilderness is Paradise enow.”

Now the idea of Paradise itself came up for reconsideration, for heaven’s sake. Or perhaps not for heaven at all. 

By the time I got to school that morning I think I had read all 75 quatrains through, eyes down on the page as I slowly trudged through the muddy, snowy alley aware of nothing other than the words on the page, the completely novel and foreign ideas and the sheer beauty of the poetry. 

I certainly didn’t understand all of it, or even very much of it but I knew beyond certainty that I wanted to. 

For the next few months I found out as much as I could about Omar Khayyam, about this Rubaiyat of his and about Edward Fitzgerald. In those days of yore the internet was known as the Dewey Decimal System and it was kept in places known as Libraries. I found out what hedonism was and Epicureanism and Islam. I found out Fitzgerald had been something called a dilettante – I had to look it up. He’d done 5 different translations – although none of them were literal translations. He’d tried to capture what he felt was the essence of Khayyam’s meanings. Many, many years later I found cause to reflect on the essential absurdity of an 19th century English agnostic in Imperial Britain attempting to capture the essential meaning of a poem written by an 11th century Muslim mathematician and astronomer. And now, since I decided to tell this story, I’ve learned that Fitzgerald’s first self-published run of 250, published anonymously, didn’t sell a single copy until 2 years after they first arrived in the book store. By this time they’d been relegated to the penny bin where a man named Whitley Stokes bought two copies to give to Dante Rossetti and Richard Burton – who subsequently bought others to give away and the wheel turned and turned again. 

There are stanzas of The Rubaiyat that have remained engraved in my memory since I first read them that morning of my young manhood. 

“The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,

Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit

Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,

Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it”

After all the reading I’ve done since those days, all the study, all the conversations, after all the drama and comedy and history, the kernel that was planted in my soul that morning has remained. I don’t know what became of that copy I found. It got misplaced somewhere in the ensuing years and really, its physical presence is almost beside the point, almost doesn’t matter. 

I’ll leave you with the final 4 quatrains. When I finally shuffle off this mortal coil think of these as my last words no matter what other drivel I might utter. 

“Alas, that Spring should vanish with the Rose

That Youth's sweet-scented Manuscript should close !

The Nightingale that in the Branches sang,

Ah, whence, and whither flown again, who knows !

Ah Love ! could thou and I with Fate conspire

To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,

Would not we shatter it to bits - and then

Re-mould it nearer to the Heart's Desire !

Ah, Moon of my Delight who know'st no wane,

The Moon of Heav'n is rising once again:

How oft hereafter rising shall she look

Through this same Garden after me - in vain!

And when Thyself with shining Foot shall pass

Among the Guests Star-scatter'd on the Grass,

And in thy joyous Errand reach the Spot

Where I made one - turn down an empty Glass !”