This week is the second examining the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam which takes a reflective turn before decrying the time wasted in pointless argument about the whys and wherefores of the world.
XXI.
Lo! some we loved, the loveliest and the best
Omar Khayyam (1048—1131), translated by Edward Fitzgerald (1809—1883)
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.
Poem 304. The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, First Edition (Quatrains 16 to 30)
XVI.
Think, in this batter’d Caravanserai
Whose Doorways are alternate Night and Day,
How Sultan after Sultan with his Pomp
Abode his Hour or two, and went his way.
XVII.
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.
XVIII.
I sometimes think that never blows so red
The Rose as where some buried Caesar bled;
That every Hyacinth the Garden wears
Dropt in its Lap from some once lovely Head.
XIX.
And this delightful Herb whose tender Green
Fledges the River’s Lip on which we lean—
Ah, lean upon it lightly! for who knows
From what once lovely Lip it springs unseen!
XX.
Ah! my Beloved, 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.
XXI.
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.
XXII.
And we, that now make merry in the Room
They left, and Summer dresses in new Bloom,
Ourselves must we beneath the Couch of Earth
Descend, ourselves to make a Couch—for whom?
XXIII.
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!
XXIV.
Alike for those who for TO-DAY prepare,
And those that after a TO-MORROW stare,
A Muezzin from the Tower of Darkness cries
“Fools! your Reward is neither Here nor There.”
XXV.
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.
XXVI.
Oh, come with old Khayyam, and leave the Wise
To talk; one thing is certain, that Life flies;
One thing is certain, and the Rest is Lies;
The Flower that once has blown for ever dies.
XXVII.
Myself when young did eagerly frequent
Doctor and Saint, and heard great Argument
About it and about: but evermore
Came out by the same Door as in I went.
XXVIII.
With them the Seed of Wisdom did I sow,
And with my own hand labour’d it to grow:
And this was all the Harvest that I reap’d—
“I came like Water, and like Wind I go.”
XXIX.
Into this Universe, and why not knowing,
Nor whence, like Water willy-nilly flowing:
And out of it, as Wind along the Waste,
I know not whither, willy-nilly blowing.
XXX.
What, without asking, hither hurried whence?
And, without asking, whither hurried hence!
Another and another Cup to drown
The Memory of this Impertinence!
This set of quatrains begins on a rather elegiac note, reflecting on those lost to time and emphasising the message that we should grasp our opportunities for pleasure while we have them, as they are soon gone. This reminds me of the line from “Vitae Summa Brevis”, by Ernest Dowson: “They are not long, the days of wine and roses.”
Quatrain 16 imagines the present as a caravanserai—a roadside inn—where the doors are adjacent nights and days and considers all who have passed through the inn, even the dynasties of sultans whose pomp is now forgotten and whose reigns now seem little more consequential than the passing of an hour or two.
The seventeenth quatrain reinforces this idea with the suggestion that for all Jamshyd’s glory and for all Bahram’s heroic power (Bahram is the hero of Shahnameh, the national epic of Greater Iran), they are now forgotten and the precincts where they lived are now the haunts of desert lions and lizards and the wild asses bray and trample the earth while they lie unconscious of their ignominy. This reminds me of the lines from Ozymandias by Percy Shelley:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
The next two quatrains pursue the idea of evanescence and suggest that the reddest roses derive their scarlet colour from the blood of slain Caesars and that hyacinths once crowned the heads of the young and the beautiful. Hyacinths are associated with spring and rebirth and therefore suggest youth, and their flowers are used in the Persian celebration of Nowruz (celebrated at the spring equinox and equivalent to the Western New Year). We are admonished to take care in resting even on the grass alongside the river, since its roots may spring from the bones of some forgotten beauty; a morbid idea but it emphasises Shakespeare’s line from Cymbeline: “Golden lads and girls all must as chimney sweepers come to dust.”
Quatrain twenty reverts to the thought that drink can equally dispel past regrets and apprehensions of the future, and dismisses tomorrow’s pallid fears since death may come at any time and “I may be/Myself with Yesterday’s Sev’n Thousand Years”—in other words, no different than the dust of all those who have died and dissipated in the manifold centuries of history.
The next quatrain reminds us of those we have loved—“the loveliest and the best/That Time and Fate of all their Vintage prest”—and have lost before their time was due. They are compared with partygoers who have “drunk their Cup a Round or two before” and left early to seek their rest.
We that remain at the party cannot rest easy despite our merry-making and fresh clothes brought by the turning of the year, since we will also die—“Ourselves must we beneath the Couch of Earth/Descend” and add to the earth on which some other partygoer will themselves rest in time.
The twenty-third quatrain is the clearest statement of “Carpe Diem” yet: we should “make the most of what we yet may spend” before we die and become one with the dust of centuries, no longer to enjoy the taste of wine, the melody and lyrics of a song or the voice of its singer. Fitzgerald repeatedly uses the French word “sans” meaning “without” to really underscore that these things are all lost once we are dead: the last line ends “sans End!” as if to say that even our death becomes insignificant and irrelevant in the turning of time.
The next quatrain returns to those who plan for a future that may not arrive—“those who for TO-DAY prepare/And those that after a TO-MORROW stare”, saying that their folly is as clear to all as if a muezzin proclaimed it from the minaret of a mosque: “your Reward is neither Here nor There”—they have wasted the happiness they might have had through agonising over their future or preparing for the present.
Quatrain twenty-five asserts that even “Saints and Sages”—the traditional sources of wisdom and learning who purport to profound knowledge of the world—are no better than false prophets and their words are scattered and scorned since dissolution, oblivion and the dust of the tomb stifles their sagacity.
The narrator urges us to “come with old Khayyam” leaving the others to talk pointless philosophy. He reminds us that “one thing is certain”—that Life is evanescent, like a flower that blossoms once and then “for ever dies.” Nothing else matters—“the Rest is Lies.”
The twenty-seventh quatrain shows us that even in his youth, when he pursued the knowledge of “Doctor and Saint” and listened to “great Argument/About it and about” the narrator found himself none the wiser for spending his time thus: he “Came out by the same Door as in I went.”
Like a farmer planting seeds and encouraging their growth by constant attention, he carefully listened to the words of the scholars and applied his own brain to the conundrum but all this contemplation and thought led him only to the awareness of Life’s transitory nature “I came like Water, and like Wind I go.”
The penultimate quatrain (for this week) emphasises the arbitrary and random nature of the world: we are born into it purposeless and without direction like water eddying in a stream, and we leave it equally haphazardly like the swirling of the wind in a wilderness.
The last quatrain is full of alliteration: the first two lines strengthen the idea conveyed in the previous quatrain: “What, without asking, hither hurried whence?/And, without asking, whither hurried hence!”—what are we that come to this world unbidden from somewhere unknown and just as mysteriously depart for some indefinite destination? Only a drink will serve to blot out the confusion brought by these fruitless observations.
To me, these quatrains express very lucidly the thoughts we feel on losing our loved ones—I have quoted quatrain 21 many times, often when writing in sympathy to bereaved friends, as it seems to encapsulate the feelings we have for those we loved and lost. The later quatrains sum up for me the essential pointlessness of trying to determine a meaning for life or derive any purpose from what may be a fundamentally random existence—ultimately, taking another drink is as good a reason for living as any other.