The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

The subtractive test finds little to cut inside a quatrain and a good deal across the sequence. Each stanza is a closed epigram: two rhymed lines set the case, the third withholds the rhyme and turns, the fourth shuts the door. “Came out by the same Door where in I went” (27) is required by the three lines before it, and nothing in them is idle. The frame is required too: dawn, the cry to open the tavern, the noon of argument, the potter’s house, the rising moon and the empty glass. What holds the axis is the sequence. The fifth edition is twenty-six quatrains longer than the first, and some additions restate what is said, as the run on the vanity of learning and the seventy-two jarring sects says one thing several times. On this axis the first edition is the tighter poem.

Score: 7.9 / 10

The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: the world gives no answer to the question of its purpose; the learned and the pious come out by the same door they went in; the heavens, “that inverted Bowl they call the Sky” (72), are as helpless as we are; and so the hour, the cup and the beloved are all that is given. It is a meaning, not a mood. The poem argues, through the pots of the Book of Pots, that a maker who sets the snare cannot justly punish the snared, and that is its one fresh turn. For its first readers, in the year of the Origin of Species, it said in a Persian mask what Tennyson and Arnold could only grieve over. Held below the gate because the meaning is old, Ecclesiastes, Horace and Lucretius, and the poem gives a known condition its finest English voice rather than opening a new one.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Height and frequency are both high for a poem of four hundred lines. The rises are many and of one kind, a cold grandeur of ruin and transience: the battered caravanserai “Whose Portals are alternate Night and Day” (17); the lion and the lizard keeping “The Courts where Jamshýd gloried and drank deep” (18); the rose that blows reddest “where some buried Cæsar bled” (19); the Moving Finger (71), whose irrevocability lands as terror in plain words; the lantern and the shadow-shapes (68); and the close, “turn down an empty Glass” (101), one of the great endings in English lyric. What holds it is the other register, absent: no transport upward, no rapture not shadowed by the grave, and in the middle the frequency of the one note lowers its force a little.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Part built, part evoked. Evoked: Jamshýd, Kaikobád, Bahrám the great hunter, Hátim and Rustum, the kings of Persian legend set as names among ruins. Built: the frame is the archetypal day, dawn as summons and moonrise as death, and the Book of Pots makes the oldest image of creation, the potter and the clay of Jeremiah and of Romans, carry the argument. The pots speak, and one asks “Who is the Potter, pray, and who the Pot?” The tavern as the world, the caravanserai as the life, the chequer-board of nights and days with men as its pieces, the ball under the polo stick: each is the whole argument in an image, and each bears load. What holds it below the gate is that the myth is a set of emblems rather than one structure the particulars grow into, and the speaker stays a voice, not a figure.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The inheritance was double: the Persian quatrain, a single epigram collected by the letter of its rhyme under a doubtful name, and the Victorian English verse of faith and doubt. The turn against both was large. FitzGerald made a scattered anthology into one poem with an arc; he fused quatrains, reordered them and added his own; and he brought the ruba’i stanza, AABA with the blank third line, into English. Against In Memoriam he set a frank, gay and blasphemous unbelief, which ends on the plea that God take “Man’s forgiveness” (81). The cost was real and was paid: the poem appeared without his name in 1859, did not sell, and was remaindered before Rossetti and Swinburne found it. The gate is met, at 8.6.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Change the form and the poem loses what it knows. The quatrain is the instrument: each is a moment complete in itself, rising on the third line to a question or an exception and falling back to the rhyme it began with, so that the form enacts the argument that every reasoning returns to where it set out. Blank verse or a continuous stanza would supply the connective the poem must not have; the gaps between stanzas are the life’s discontinuity, the separate cups. Over the separate moments the sequence of a day lays the one arc that is certain, dawn to dark. Held below the top because the same form also makes some stanzas interchangeable, which a form wholly fused with its knowledge would not allow, and because the first edition’s tighter arc shows the form doing more with less.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Evidence first, and the evidence is mixed. The poem has been returned to without a break for a century and a half, and the questions round it keep yielding: what a translation is; how much of it is Khayyam and how much FitzGerald; what the Orient was to the Victorians; how the five editions differ, and why. But the yield is mostly about the poem rather than in it. Its own thought is plain on a first reading and does not deepen much on the tenth, and the pleasure of return is the pleasure of the sound and the stanzas, which is real and not inexhaustible. The criticism that keeps reopening is about authorship and translation, not about the poem’s meaning. The well is wide and not very deep; the gate of 7.5 is cleared, narrowly, at 7.8.

Score: 7.8 / 10

The field is English poetry of the nineteenth century, with translation as its border. The intrinsic force: a new English stanza; a new model of translation as recreation, the source taken as material for an English poem, which the desk judges carried on in the twentieth century’s versions, Pound’s Cathay among them; and the first English poem to make unbelief a pleasure rather than a wound. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Swinburne took the stanza, varied, for “Laus Veneris”; the poem made the West’s image of Persian poetry for a century; and its lines became titles, O’Neill’s Ah, Wilderness! and Christie’s The Moving Finger. Its wide presence, the Omar Khayyam Club of 1892 and illustrated editions without number, is presence, not reach. It moved taste more than it moved the art: no school of English poetry grew from it.

Score: 8.4 / 10

A survival of 167 years, in the step for seventy years to two centuries. Form: the text survives whole in all five editions, each authorized, with nothing lost and nothing in doubt; nothing is charged. Presence: from 1861 to about 1930 it was among the most widely read poems in English, in every pocket and gift edition, and it has been in print without a break since. That presence has narrowed. The poem is quoted more than read, taught less than its Victorian peers, and read as much in translation studies as in poetry; that is not a loss of the text, but it holds the figure at the foot of the step rather than at the widest presence. Fabric: the Victorian Persian dress is of its moment, and has survived its moment.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Judged on FitzGerald’s English, which is the work. The command is of the line and the quatrain: an easy, spoken pentameter with the finish of the Augustan closed couplet; alliteration used for weight, “Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer” (24); the turn of the unrhymed third line timed to the syllable; and endings that fall with finality, “Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it” (71). The capitals, the Persian names and the accents are part of the music and of the dress. Charged: archaism and filler where a rhyme forced it, “enow” and inversions weaker than the magnificent “where in I went”; a few quatrains in the fifth edition slack or merely clever; and revisions that lost a better first reading, the 1859 “Bowl of Night” against the more decorous opening of 1889.

Score: 8.7 / 10

One law governs the poem: one voice, the drinker who has argued and lost, and one argument, that the question has no answer and the hour is all. Take the two most distant elements: the opening summons to the tavern at dawn, and the theodicy of the Book of Pots, where pots dispute their potter’s justice. They obey the same law. The pots are the drinkers in clay, and their talk ends as the moon of Ramazan rises and the porter brings the wine. The close returns to the moon, the garden and the guests on the grass, and the frame shuts. Held at this figure because the range is narrow, one mood with variations, one register in a darker and a lighter key, and narrowness is not coherence: this is the coherence of a short lyric sequence, achieved over a modest range.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Judged on what a lyric sequence of four hundred lines holds; a low mark on a small form describes the form. The sacred, as question and accusation. The natural order, in the rose, the dust, the rain, the season and the moon. History, in the fallen kings and the courts given to the lion and the lizard. Death throughout. Love, in the “Thou” and the Sákí. Learning and its vanity, in the doctors, the saints and the sects. They are held together in one argument, not listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve, at 7.0, is count and vantage: the family, labour except the potter’s as a figure, the state, and any mind other than the speaker’s are absent; and everything is seen from one place, the cup, so that what is encompassed is a stance toward the world rather than the world.

Score: 7.0 / 10