This week’s quatrains emphasise our powerlessness in the hands of Fate.
‘Tis all a Chequer-board of Nights and Days
Omar Khayyam (1048—1131), translated by Edward Fitzgerald (1809—1883)
Where Destiny with Men for Pieces plays:
Hither and thither moves, and mates, and slays,
And one by one back in the Closet lays.
Poem 306. The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, First Edition (Quatrains 46 to 58)
XLVI.
For in and out, above, about, below,
‘Tis nothing but a Magic Shadow-show,
Play’d in a Box whose Candle is the Sun,
Round which we Phantom Figures come and go.
XLVII.
And if the Wine you drink, the Lip you press,
End in the Nothing all Things end in—Yes—
Then fancy while Thou art, Thou art but what
Thou shalt be—Nothing—Thou shalt not be less.
XLVIII.
While the Rose blows along the River Brink,
With old Khayyam the Ruby Vintage drink:
And when the Angel with his darker Draught
Draws up to thee—take that, and do not shrink.
XLVIX.
‘Tis all a Chequer-board of Nights and Days
Where Destiny with Men for Pieces plays:
Hither and thither moves, and mates, and slays,
And one by one back in the Closet lays.
L.
The Ball no Question makes of Ayes and Noes,
But Right or Left as strikes the Player goes;
And He that toss’d Thee down into the Field,
He knows about it all—HE knows—HE knows!
LI.
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.
LII.
And that inverted Bowl we call The Sky,
Whereunder crawling coop’t we live and die,
Lift not thy hands to IT for help—for It
Rolls impotently on as Thou or I.
LIII.
With Earth’s first Clay They did the Last Man’s knead,
And then of the Last Harvest sow’d the Seed:
Yea, the first Morning of Creation wrote
What the Last Dawn of Reckoning shall read.
LIV.
I tell Thee this—When, starting from the Goal,
Over the shoulders of the flaming Foal
Of Heav’n Parwin and Mushtari they flung,
In my predestin’d Plot of Dust and Soul
LV.
The Vine had struck a Fibre; which about
It clings my Being—let the Sufi flout;
Of my Base Metal may be filed a Key,
That shall unlock the Door he howls without.
LVI.
And this I know: whether the one True Light,
Kindle to Love, or Wrath consume me quite,
One Glimpse of It within the Tavern caught
Better than in the Temple lost outright.
LVII.
Oh Thou who didst with Pitfall and with Gin
Beset the Road I was to wander in,
Thou wilt not with Predestination round
Enmesh me, and impute my Fall to Sin?
LVIII.
Oh Thou, who Man of baser Earth didst make,
And who with Eden didst devise the Snake;
For all the Sin wherewith the Face of Man
Is blacken’d, Man’s Forgiveness give—and take!
This set of quatrains reminds us of our impotence in the face of Fate and suggests that we should accept the present for what it is, since our time is so brief.
Quatrain 46 likens our lives to “a Magic Shadow-show” and is very reminiscent of Macbeth’s reflections on the brevity and meaninglessness of life near the end of Shakespeare’s play:
MACBETH: She should have died hereafter.
There would have been a time for such a word.
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Macbeth’s reflections derive from the despair of his heart and the consciousness that all his ambition and great plans have come to nothing; Khayyam’s words express a different sentiment—he has accepted the evanescent nature of life and simply wishes to celebrate it while that’s possible.
The next quatrain says that even if everything comes to naught—“if the Wine you drink, the Lip you press,/End in the Nothing all Things end in”—we can console ourselves that we will never be less than the nothingness from which we arose.
We are urged to enjoy our lives—“While the Rose blows along the River Brink/With old Khayyam the Ruby Vintage drink”—and when the end inevitably arrives, we should accept it willingly—“when the Angel with his darker Draught/Draws up to thee–take that and do not shrink.” The Angel with the darker Draught is Death who carries the deadly potion that takes us out of the world.
The next quatrain has often been quoted by authors to express the idea of a Fate that governs our lives—Nevil Shute titled his novel “The Chequer Board” from this quatrain, and quotes it at the beginning of the book. Life is presented as a game played by Fate, who moves us and others at a whim just as a chess player “moves, and mates, and slays” and when we lose our place on the board, we are returned to the box of pieces ready for the next time.
The next quatrain uses a different metaphor—the ball in a sports match goes hither and thither according to the players’ intentions but seeks not to influence its path nor to contemplate the reasons for its travelling, although the creator who began the game and monitors and controls it understands all.
Quatrain 51 imagines our lives as a sequence of words which, once written, cannot be erased or cancelled by the deepness of our belief, the sharpness of our wits nor the breadth of our sorrow. It inspired Agatha Christie to name one of her Miss Marple books “The Moving Finger” and is another of my favourites since it pithily expresses the merciless and obdurate way that life continues around us as our world falls apart.
The following quatrain tells us that even prayer brings no surcease from our fate—“Lift not thy hands to IT for help”—and that our god or gods are as helpless in the face of destiny as we are—“for It/Rolls impotently on as Thou or I”.
In the next quatrain, our narrator tells us that everything is foreordained—that the last person on Earth will inherit the substance of their ultimate progenitor and the last harvest springs ultimately from the first sowing of seed. The end of days is likewise rooted in the Creation, for everything has been predestined from that point. This quatrain underlines the idea that our lives are predetermined and there is nothing we can do to control or avert our fate—there is no such thing as free will, according to Khayyam. This seems quite a likely belief for a twelfth century astronomer since they would have observed the immutable cycling of the stars and the planets.
In the next couple of quatrains, our narrator asserts that his love for “The Vine” was kindled simultaneously with the creation of Mushtari (the planet Jupiter) and Parwin (the Pleiades), and that though Sufis (ascetic mystics) may scoff and deprecate his drunken behaviour, perhaps his base nature will provide a key to unlock the door that bars their full understanding.
He says that whatever the effect of this understanding—“whether the one True Light/Kindle to Love, or Wrath consume me quite”—he is more likely to catch a hint of it in an inn than in praying in the Temple.
In the last two quatrains for this week, our narrator worries that the Creator, having surrounded us with temptations and traps that entice us to sin, should not attribute the iniquity of our foreordained actions to a voluntary choice of sin. He then goes on to propose that God who knowingly made people of clay and tempted Adam and Eve in the great garden of Eden, should forgive his creation “all the Sin wherewith the Face of Man/Is blacken’d” and should receive our forgiveness in turn.
I like this sequence because it expresses so well the indifference of the Universe to our petty concerns and because of its imagery, particularly the “Chequer-board of Nights and Days” which perfectly describes the alternating darkness and light we experience daily and “The Moving Finger.”