"The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam"

In “The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám,” Fitzgerald adapted to English the classical Persian “rubai,” (the second sound rhyming with “eye”), a four-line stanza with the rhyme-scheme AABA or AAAA. Though the rubai is a versatile form that had already been adapted in languages such as Turkish, Urdu, and Hindustani by the end of the 16th century, Fitzgerald’s translation was among the first to experiment with it in English. Fitzgerald’s particular innovation is to write the rubai in iambic pentameter. In Persian the line of a rubai often has 13 syllables, instead of the iambic 10, and the stresses vary.

One of the interesting aspects of the rubai is that it has an epigrammatic or sonnet-like structure, with the second couplet producing a volta or turn that inverts the idea propounded in the first couplet. Like in the sonnet, the last line performs something of a flourish or mic-drop, answering a question, making a joke, or delivering a devastating and unexpected resolution. “The Rubaiyat” vividly demonstrates this epigrammatic propensity, such as in its second verse:

Dreaming when Dawn’s Left Hand was in the Sky

I heard a Voice within the Tavern cry,

‘Awake, my Little ones, and fill the Cup

Before Life’s Liquor in its Cup be dry’ (Lines 5-8).

The second couplet of this verse adds metaphorical imagery to the literal setting of the first (a traveler near a tavern in dawn’s hours). The cup in the second couplet refers to both the actual wine goblet, as well as the mortal vessel (human body). The last line turns in the knife further: One must keep filling one’s wine cup, because the cup of life is destined to run out soon. As shown through this example, each subsequent line of the rubai expands on the meaning of its predecessor.

Although Khayyam’s rubais in Persian (Farsi) are standalone lyric nazms or poems, and were organized according to custom by end-rhyme in the Oxford manuscript, Fitzgerald arranged the verses in a loose but dependent narrative structure which unfolds from dawn to night. In doing so, Fitzgerald’s intent was  to bring a narrative unity to the vast corpus of the rubais, making them more accessible to readers unfamiliar with the Persian tradition. An analysis of the verses reveals that Fitzgerald also organized them by mood and tone; the first 20 rubais are filled with a carpe-diem (Latin for “seize the day”) injunction to make hedonistic merriment while there is life. The settings of this section of the poem are the tavern and the garden, though in the original Persian all the rubais are placed in an unknown or universal setting. The choice of season (spring) gives the poet (Khayyam) useful symbols from the Persian and Sufi traditions: the grape, the rose, the wine cup, and the nightingale. The symbols, especially the flowers, are extremely useful for Fitzgerald as well: “Floriography” or the language of flowers was a popular Victorian preoccupation, with specific virtues attached to various flowers, such as sorrow to hyacinth. Thus, the text is rich with beautiful, pastoral imagery, such as in Verse 11, one of the most famous verses in “The Rubaiyat”:

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 (Lines 41-44).

Yet, almost from the very onset, the note of pastoral beauty is undercut by the heavy awareness of mortality. The speaker is not just asking his beloved and the reader to forget all their cares and make merry, he is asking them to do so because they have very little time on earth. The condition of time is thus an ever-present motif, a scepter haunting the happiness of the lovers. Juxtaposed with the pastoral imagery are references to historical and mythical figures who symbolize temporal, earthly power. Significantly, though the speaker urges his beloved (and the reader) to immerse themselves in the beauty of nature, to him nature is also a constant reminder of the inexorably moving wheel of time. The lines of Verse 17 precisely capture the cruel beauty with which time and nature level mortal dreams:

They say the Lion and the Lizard keep

The Courts where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep:

And Bahram, that great Hunter—the Wild Ass

Stamps o’er his Head, and he lies fast asleep (Lines 65-68).

Note the dark humor in the image of the lion and lizard keeping court in the halls of Jamshyd’s glory. For the Victorian reader, the lion and the lizard would have additional resonance, since the lion is a symbol of Christ, and the lizard a representation of uncontrolled nature. Additionally, the passage has the ring of a Biblical prophecy, where prophets often use the imagery of animals inhabiting the ruins of palaces as a warning against kingly pride. Thus, nature, destiny, and an unknown creator level kings and slaves, poets and warriors alike. Enmeshed, these various symbols and ideas convey a mood which is both hedonistic and somber. The open contradictions here can be analyzed textually as representing the speaker’s admission that his knowledge system, like all epistemologies, is finite and limited. Further, it can be argued that the poem is not as hedonistic in tone as its Victorian interpreters assumed; Khayyam draws on various other philosophical traditions as well to explore the human condition.

As the Rubaiyat approaches its second section (Verses 23-44) the speaker’s tone begins to grow sharper, graver, and more strident; the pastoral imagery of the previous verses is briefly set aside. One of the most prominent themes explored in this section is the failure of religion and reason to answer questions about the purpose of existence. For instance, note the acerbic tone of Verse 27:

Why, all the Saints and Sages who discuss’d

Of the Two Worlds so learnedly, are thrust

Like foolish Prophets forth; their Words to Scorn

Are scatter’d, and their Mouths are stopt with Dust (Lines 87-90).

Here, the dreamy, philosophical speaker of the previous section gives way to a truth-teller persona, a critic of society, a disruptor of order. Note the sharp qualifiers such as “foolish” in Verse 27; as well as the dire assertion that the words of the wise are scattered to scorn, their mouths stopped with dust. The tonal shift in this section conveys the speaker’s irreverence for the sophists (scholars who use excessive rhetoric) and ritualists of his time. The speaker turns his attention to debunking the scholars and saints of his time, as well as the schools of reason and logic. The implication here is that such men pretend they know the answers but are as clueless as anyone else. In Verse 24, the minaret of the mosque is described as the “tower of darkness,” and the muezzin, the cleric who calls the believers to prayer, shouts that there is no afterlife. These images are blasphemous and underscore the speaker’s disdain for organized religion. However, it must be noted here that “tower of darkness” is Fitzgerald’s translation; whether the original Persian used the same phrase is debatable.

Further in these passages, the imagery too shifts to spaces rooted in the concrete and abstract: the world of mosques, shops, and doors, as well as the cosmology of Khayyam’s time. Natural elements, previously symbols of power, now occur as metaphors for powerlessness. In Verses 28-29, the speaker speaks for the wise, who come like water and go like the wind. Like these mindless elements, the wise (and all humans) flow and drift “willy-nilly.” The idea of the wind and water being at the mercy of a higher force is new to the poem sequence, and also hints that the speaker is not an atheist. He does believe in a higher power; however, his relationship with this power is ambiguous, and can certainly not be negotiated through traditional religion.

The enclosed, private world of the garden now expands into public spaces of mosques, inns, and markets. Metaphors for transit and transcendence, such as doors and veils, few in the early section of the poem, occur more frequently here. When the speaker rises to the peak of the known universe in Verse 31, he can see the world laid out before him, but he cannot answer why humans exist. However, the door of truth can be opened and the veil covering reality can be rent by falling into intoxication, rather than rising into false knowledge (Verse 32). Thus, the speaker seems to be saying that confessing one’s powerlessness is the path to true curiosity and knowledge. These ideas can be interpreted as mystic and devotional; however, the speaker’s later ridicule of the Sufi seeker undermines that interpretation. Again, the ridicule of the Sufi may be Fitzgerald’s interpolation, since he believed Khayyam mocked the Sufis. Other scholars, however, have argued Fitzgerald’s knowledge of Khayyam and the Persian language was not deep enough to make this assertion, Sufism itself being more than a monolithic belief system.

In Verse 33 onwards, there occurs another shift; the speaker’s acerbity giving way to a bleak, nihilistic realism, and then, despair, resignation, and finally humor. In Verse 33, the heavens have no answer for suffering humans, offering them only a “blind understanding” (Line 132). In Verse 36, the potter’s clay begs its maker to handle it gently, like humans begging destiny to treat them with a gentler touch. And in Verse 38, a Caravan starts for “the dawn of nothing” (Line 152). Unlike the dawn of hope in the first few verses of the poem, dawn now signifies a bleak nothingness. Even reason and logic offer no meaning; thus the speaker divorces “old barren Reason from my bed” (Line 159), replacing her with wine, the daughter of the grape. It is in this section too that the motif of the earthen bowl or pot, which first appeared in Verse 2, returns, only to recur across many verses in section 3 in an elaborate extended metaphor.

An interesting feature of “The Rubaiyat” is that despite the tonal shifts and addition of new motifs, older motifs recur throughout, tying the text’s imagery into a cohesive whole. Some of these repeated motifs are clay and figures made from earth, wine, and natural and pastoral elements. Wine, in particular, is a recurrent motif, and must be analyzed through different lenses. It is “The Rubaiyat’s” love for wine that counts for its reputation as a text championing hedonism or living only for sensual pleasure. Certainly, Fitzgerald himself held the belief, since he reads the wine-symbolism of the verses literally. Fitzgerald is keen to rescue Khayyam’s verses from the Persian Sufi symbology, in which wine is often a metaphor for divine intoxication or love. Drunk on the wine of God’s love, the Sufi seeker only wants to lose himself further till he unites with a divine reality.

While Fitzgerald is right in the belief that Khayyam wasn’t a Sufi of this stripe, it is erroneous to assume that wine in “The Rubaiyat” is a symbol only for the hedonistic life. The imagery and symbolism of the verses themselves suggest that the wine metaphor has various meanings. The intoxication in “The Rubaiyat” is a symbol of worldly pleasure, but also of living fully in the moment, and of the clear juice of realism. The verses also use wine symbols ironically, precisely to poke fun at the orthodoxy, such as when the speaker insists an Angel gave him wine to drink (Verse 42), or that the cult of the Grape (the drinking habit) can confuse the most profound of religious schools. This ironical heresy recurs later in Verse 55 as well:

The Vine had struck a Fibre; which about

It clings my Being—let the Súfi flout;

Of my Base Metal may be filed a Key,

That shall unlock the Door he howls without (Lines 217-20).

Wine can give the Poet an insight into things which may inspire contempt in the learned Sufi, yet the speaker in his literal intoxication may be more enlightened than the Sufi in his divine madness. In the last couplet of the verse, the speaker compares his being to a Base Metal from which a Key could be made to unlock the Door which metaphorically prevents the Sufi, despite all his learning and erudition, from discovering the Secrets of Life and Destiny.

The wine symbolism continues in the third section of the poem (Verses 45-53), with the text adding many new metaphors as well. The world, having been described as a garden and inn so far, is now compared to a game. In Verse 46, the world is described as a show of shadow puppetry. The kind of puppetry alluded to is the Magic Lantern, in which a set of opaque images of people, animals, and foliage are engraved onto a cylinder made of transparent material. The cylinder is then made to revolve around a central lamp or candle. With the turning of the cylinder, the revolving shadows of the images are projected onto the walls of the room. The speaker likens the world to a shadow show, where the sun is the candle. The metaphor is interesting, if a little confusing. The shadowy human world dancing around the sun suggests that Omar Khayyam may have known of the Earth’s rotation; however, this idea is at odds with the speaker rising to Saturn to view earth at the center of the cosmos. Further, so far, the speaker has insisted the real world is the only reality; thus, his comparing it to a shadow dance seems strange.

Again, the discrepancies can be notched down to gaps in translation, the arrangement of the verses, as well as their attribution. (Some critics suggest that the ideas in the rubais are so disparate they could not have been authored by the same person.) However, other ways to interpret the metaphor of the Magic Lantern preserve the text’s narrative integrity: The world seems shadowy to humans because they lack sufficient knowledge, or that the world is shadowy because it is ephemeral and mortal. The image also seems to draw from Plato’s allegory of the cave (discussed in the “Symbols & Motifs” section of this guide), which is likely, since Khayyam was schooled in Greek philosophy. Whatever their meaning, these verses about the shadowy nature of human life seem to fill the speaker with despair again, finding himself at the mercy of an unknown fate. In Verse 50, the speaker asserts that “He” who toss’d humans into life’s field like a ball, “He knows about it all—HE knows—HE knows!” (Line 200). Note the underlying sense of menace in the capitalization and the repetition. In Verse 52, the dawn sky of the first verses has turned into a stifling inverted coop under which humans crawl like insects.

Punctuated by flashes of wit and epiphany, this somber mood runs over into first half of the final quarter (Verses 54-75) of “The Rubaiyat.” Verse 56 contains the core of Khayyam’s philosophy in “The Rubaiyat,” if there is any. The speaker states that glimpsing a flash of truth in a tavern is better than to have never glimpsed it in a temple or a mosque. The meaning of this verse is two-fold: At the secular level, it means that one is better off as a self-aware agnostic than as a deluded believer. If the lines are interpreted in a more mystic vein, they imply truth or God can be experienced in the most profane space—it does not require the medium of mosque or temple.

The text revisits its clay and pot imagery at length to ponder the nature of the mysterious “He” of verse 50 in the Kuza-Nama (Verses 59-66). In the heretical or blasphemous peak of the poem sequence, the visage of the potter, “the surly tapster” (Line 253) is described as daubed with the smoke of hell. The image is of a man baking clay pots in an oven, his face darkened with soot. The mention of hell, the imagery of the burning oven, and the description of the man as “surly” all evoke the idea of the devil, rather than God. However, previous verses have clearly described the potter as a creator identified with the divine maker. The contradiction can be explained by the speaker implying that, for the helpless human, God and the Devil are alike. The use of the anachronistic “Pish!” (Line 255; an English expression close to “Bah” or the contemporary “whatever”) cements that it doesn’t matter; call it the Devil or God, fate always torments humans.

While the Kuza-Nama is best known for its extended metaphor, it also provides the text with lively dialogue and addresses, animating it with a new force. The pots (humans) may be made of clay, but the very fact that they chatter means there is a permanence in speech and song that even the text itself cannot deny. Note that the pots do not lament their fate but ask questions as profound as “Who is the Potter, pray, and who the Pot?” (Line 240).

The last 10 verses of the poem return to the motifs of rose, wine, and grape. Interestingly, as if to combine the profane and mystic philosophies to which the speaker has so far referred, dedication to wine takes on quasi-religious tones in these verses. As is typical with Khayyam, the idea of wine as religion is rooted in the real—liquor as a means to escape/tolerate reality—but has deep metaphorical underpinnings. In addition to its previous meanings, wine or intoxication can now be said to represent love, which is the only truth. This is because the wine motif now occurs in conjunction with a romantic, night-time landscape, and returns the speaker to the privacy of the garden, alone with his beloved. The addresses to the beloved return as well, evoking the romantic and religious symbolism of wine, intoxication, cup, and cup-bearer in the Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Indian Sufi traditions. The cup-bearer is the muse, the teacher, the earthly beloved, or the friend who leads the seeker to the ultimate intoxication of union with the divine.

Echoing the beginning of the poem sequence, these last verses temper their vivid imagery of a night garden with the awareness of human mortality. Night, as beautiful as it may be, is also the death of day and a reminder that “Spring should vanish with the Rose! / That Youth’s sweet-scented Manuscript should close!” (Lines 285-86) Even moonrise reminds the poet his beloved will one day look at a moon without him. In the last rubai, the poet requests his beloved—so often a stand-in for the reader—to pour a glass of wine over his grave, a motion which would be considered blasphemous in traditional Islam. However, in Christian mythos, the wine is symbolic of the blood of Christ, and the metaphor of wine watering the poet’s grave suggests an end which is not as gloomy as he would think. The wine over his grave also ties in with the image of flowers rising from the breath of the resurrected Christ. Another way to interpret these lines is that the speaker will remain faithful to the religion of wine till the very end, and the elixir, which makes life on earth tolerable, is more precious to him than a sanctified tincture or any holy water. The emphatic act of pouring the wine on the grave and the image of the upturned cup also represent the completion of a narrative arc: Having debated philosophical questions in different ways, the speaker returns to the finality of death and the world of sensorial pleasure.