Edward FitzGerald’s ‘Rubaiyat’

Omar Khayyam (1048-1131) was a renowned l2th-century Persian mathematician, astronomer and philosopher.  He wrote The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam in a rubai (plural rubaiyat ), a 4-line stanza with rhymes in the 1st, 2nd and 4th lines.  The translator, Edward FitzGerald, was a repressed homosexual who’d escaped into poetry from a disastrous short-lived marriage.  His excellent biographer, Robert Bernard Martin, explains that “custom, morality, convention and formality had, in his eyes, all led to unhappiness because he tried to subdue his natural inclinations to fit them”.

FitzGerald’s translation was published anonymously in 1859 in an edition of 250 copies, priced at one shilling.  It failed to sell and was consigned to a bookseller’s bargain box for one penny.  The poem was accidentally discovered and praised by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who passed it on to other enthusiastic Victorian heavyweights: Algernon Swinburne, Robert Browning, William Morris, George Meredith and John Ruskin, who wrote, “I never did—till this day—read anything so glorious to my mind as this poem.”  Since then FitzGerald’s version has been translated into nearly 50 languages.  An Omar Khayyam Club meets in London for recitations and ceremonial feasts.

What explains the poem’s spectacular international success?  Its appealing dolce far niente attitude and egoistic self-indulgence opposed the traditional Victorian virtues of industry and perseverance, advocated in Samuel Smiles Self-Help, and contradicted the view of life as a savage struggle for survival, described in Charles Darwin’s The Origin of the Species. (By coincidence, FitzGerald, Smiles and Darwin all published their books in 1859.)  FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat also appealed to the contemporary interest in Muslim countries, to the lure and luxury of the East.  The Arabian Nights had been translated and published in 1706; Eugène Delacroix’s The Women of Algiers (1834) and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’ The Turkish Bath (1862) portrayed the sensual delights of naked women in the Middle East.  In these paintings the beautiful virginal houris, promised to the Faithful in Paradise, appear in earthly form.  FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat combines titillating exotic content with lush images of sensuality, mystery and satiety; it has an enchanting, languid and gently pessimistic aura.

The Rubaiyat , with musical variations, advocated refined hedonism.  The Latin poet Horace had urged: carpe diem , “seize the day, trusting as little as possible to the future.”  FitzGerald boldly declared,  “one thing is certain, that Life flies. . . . Drink!—for once dead you never shall return.”  In old age many people regret having missed life’s pleasures, but in the poem no inhibitions or obstacles prevent Epicurean indulgence.  For the hedonist too much is just enough.  In the Hebrew Bible, Ecclesiastes is also hedonistic: “Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth . . . there is no wisdom in the grave, whither thou goest.”  The Song of Solomon, in the spiritual context of the Old Testament, is surprisingly sensual: “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth. . . . for thy love is better than wine. . . . A bundle of myrrh is my well beloved unto me; he shall lie all night betwixt my breasts,” which are like “twins of a gazelle.” 

Thomas Carlyle called Omar Khayyam “that old Mohammedan blackguard”. In the Koran, wine is forbidden and sinful, but the poet constantly urges the men to drink.  Wine is a metaphor for all worldly pleasures, especially unmentionable sex, and provides both medicine and oblivion: “But fill me with the old familiar Juice / Methinks I might recover by-and-bye!”  Western poets have often encouraged congenial and sexual drinking:  In “To Celia” (1616), Ben Jonson wrote, “Drink to me only with thine eyes  / And I will pledge with mine; / Or leave a kiss but in the cup, / And I’ll not look for wine.”  In “Ode to a Nightingale” (1819), John Keats rapturously sought wine to achieve forgetfulness and escape from the cruel world:

O for a beaker full of the warm South, 

          Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene, 

                 With beaded bubbles winking at the brim, 

                         And purple-stained mouth; 

       That I might drink, and leave the world unseen, 

                And with thee fade away into the forest dim.

Edgar Poe, in “The City in the Sea” (1845), praised “the viol, the violet and the vine.”

 In “Vitae Summa Brevis” (Life’s Supreme Shortness, 1896), Ernest Dowson celebrated the “days of wine and roses.” 

Robert Martin writes that FitzGerald’s “method of composition was to read over the relevant sections several times until their broad outlines were fixed in his mind, then to go for a long walk and work out the stanzas.”  The poem is an improvisation rather than a translation, faithful to the spirit of Omar rather than to the literal text.  Martin notes that the homosexual FitzGerald  deliberately obscures the sex of the beloved, omitting the queerest quatrain, which a French translator called “ la singularité des images trop orientales, d’une sensualité quelquefois revoltante ” (“its particular quality of excessively oriental images, of a sometimes revolting sensuality”).

FitzGerald himself observed that the translation “must live : with a transfusion of one’s own worse Life if one can’t retain the Original better.  Better a live Sparrow than a stuffed Eagle.”  He added that the mood changes throughout the poem as sadness mixes with merriment.  It opens at daybreak and ends at night: “He begins with Dawn pretty sober and contemplative: then as he thinks and drinks, grows savage, blasphemous, etc. and then again sobers down into melancholy at nightfall.”

The Rubaiyat is dramatically structured by many contrasts and antitheses that sometimes merge: temple-tavern, bitter-happy, pain-pleasure, dust-wine, ashes-hope, desert-snow, dross-gold, curse-blessing, waking-dreaming, solitude-desire, past-present, winter-spring, fate-will, dark-light, life-death, earth-heaven, mortality-paradise. 

FitzGerald uses archaic diction—hath, methought, thou, enow—and breathless exclamations: Lo, Ah, Oh.  He includes many allusions—mainly from the Bible, Shakespeare and Keats—and creates a great many lines that would reappear in the work of modern writers:

#3- “as the Cock crew”— John 18:27, “Peter then denied again: and immediately the cock crew.”

#4- “White Hand of Moses”— Exodus 4:6, Moses “put his hand into his bosom: and when he took it out, behold, his hand was leprous as snow.”

#11- “singing in the Wilderness” – Isaiah 40:3, “The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness.”

#14- “Lighting a little hour or two” – Macbeth (1607), “struts and frets his hour upon the stage.” 

#19- “so red / The Rose” —Robert Burns, “A Red, Red Rose” (1794), “My love is like a red, red rose.”

#25- “Mouths are stopt with Dust”— Hamlet (1601), “Imperious Caesar, dead and turned to clay / Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.”

#28- “I came like Water, and like Wind I go” – John Keats’ dying words: “Here lies one whose name was writ on water.”

#53- “With Earth’s first Clay They did the Last Man’s knead” and #61- “That He who subtly wrought me into Shape / Should stamp me back to common Earth again” 

–both from Genesis 2:7, “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground.”

#72- “The Nightingale that in the Branches sang” – Shakespeare, Sonnet 73 (1609): “Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang” and Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale”: “That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees / Singest of summer in full-throated ease.”

#76- Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.”—Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1847), “Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean, / Tears from the depth of some divine despair.”

In the 2nd revised edition, #6- “the Nightingale cries to the Rose / That sallow cheek of hers to incarnadine” – Macbeth (1607), “the multitudinous seas incarnadine” (blood red).

#18- “How Sultán after Sultán with his pomp / Abode his destined Hour, and went his way.” – Shakespeare, Richard II (1596), “For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground / And tell sad stories of the death of kings.” #41- “Down Man’s successive generations roll’d” – Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale,” “No hungry generations tread thee down.” 

#68- “Are all but Stories, which awoke from Sleep” – Leigh Hunt, “Abou Ben Adhem” (1834), “Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace.” 

#108- “Ah Love! could you and I with Fate conspire” – Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach” (1851), “Ah, love, let us be true / To one another.”

FitzGerald’s words have sunk into the English language like precious ore to be mined by others for decades to come: the phrase “Heart’s Desire” and the martial “Music of a distant Drum!,” the titles of Gertrude Bell’s The Desert and the Sown, Eugene O’Neill’s Ah, Wilderness! , Agatha Christie’s The Moving Finger , Frank Budgen’s Myselves When Young and many others.

The best quatrains are superb.  The Rubaiyat opens dramatically with:

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. (#1)

By contrast to “Awake!”, the traditional aubade is spoken by a man who’s reluctantly departing at dawn and bidding farewell to his sleeping woman after a night of love.  In this quatrain celestial powers wake up the man as a luminous streak circles the turret as if capturing a wild animal.  The imperative command startles the man from sleep and propels him into active enjoyment of the sensual world:

 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. (#11)

“A loaf of bread, a flask of wine and thou”—food, drink, poetry, music and a lover in solitary nature—provide the perfect life. 

The Worldly Hope men set their Hearts upon  

Turns Ashes—or it prospers; and anon,    

     Like Snow upon the Desert’s dusty Face 

 Lighting a little Hour or two—is gone. (#14)

Ashes, snow, desert and dust root the poem in physical reality.  Hope, whether achieved or frustrated, is illusory.  Like desert snow it briefly appears, lingers a short while and soon vanishes.  François Villon expressed the same theme in 1489: Mais où sont les neiges d’antan? (“Where are the snows of yesteryear?”).

Ah! my Belovéd, fill the Cup that clears 

 To-day of past Regrets and future Fears-    

     To-morrow?—Why, To-morrow I may be  

Myself with Yesterday’s Sev’n Thousand Years. (#20)

Bountiful wine and hedonistic pleasures provided by the beloved obliterate old sorrows and fears of death during the traditional length of human history.  You might soon join the immemorial dead, and must live today.

Lo! some we loved, the loveliest and the best 

That Time and Fate of all their Vintage prest,  

      Have drunk their Cup a Round or two before,  

And one by one crept silently to Rest. (#21)

This quatrain expresses a prominent theme in medieval Latin literature: Ubi sunt, “where are they now?”  The poets mourn all their friends, the best of them now dead.  As Thomas Nashe lamented in “A Litany in Time of Plague” (1592), death and suffering are inevitable:

Brightness falls from the air 

Queens have died young and fair.

Dust hath closed Helen’s eye.

I am sick, I must die.

The next quatrain is intensified by four repetitions of “Dust” that echo “The Burial of the Dead” service in The Book of Common Prayer (1549): “ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”  

Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend, 

Before we too into the Dust Descend;    

     Dust into Dust, and under Dust, to lie,  

Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer and—sans End! (#23)

The last line, with four repetitions of “sans,” alludes to the total loss of pleasure when lapsing into second childhood and descending into mere oblivion, “Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything,” in Shakespeare’s As You Like It (1599). 

Fate, an active scribe, predicts man’s ineluctable death.  

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,  

Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit    

       Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, 

 Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it. (#76)

Neither religion, cleverness nor weeping can change your tragic destiny.  The entire poem moves from morning to night.  The penultimate quatrain in the 2nd edition states, “But see! The rising Moon of Heav’n again– / Looks for us” and the bright firmament is scattered with stars.  Tamam Shud: It is ended.

The Rubaiyat achieved tremendous popular success through its appeal to the senses, opposition to strict Victorian values, series of thematic contrasts and literary allusions that make the exotic seem familiar as well as its gorgeous imagery, expert rhyme, clear meaning and delightful mixture of melancholy and mirth.  C. M. Bowra defined FitzGerald’s style as “at once highly coloured and strictly drilled, bold in its sweep and yet careful of every step that it takes, straightforward as common speech and yet loaded with imaginative association at every point, reckless and ironical, outspoken and controlled, passionate and witty.”

Jeffrey Meyers has recently published James Salter: Pilot, Screenwriter, Novelist and Parallel Lives: From Freud and Mann to Arbus and Plath , and will bring out 45 Ways of Looking at Hemingway in 2025, all with Louisiana State University Press.

A Message from TheArticle

We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an important contribution to make, one that’s needed now more than ever, and we need your help to continue publishing throughout these hard economic times. So please, make a donation.