The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám

Omar Khayyám, the Astronomer-Poet of Persia

Omar Khayyám was born at Naishápúr in Khorassán in the latter half of our Eleventh, and died within the first quarter of our Twelfth Century. The slender story of his life is curiously twined about that of two other very considerable figures in their time and country: one of whom tells the story of all three. This was Nizám ul Mulk, Vizyr to Alp Arslan the son, and Malik Shah the grandson, of Toghrul Beg the Tartar, who had wrested Persia from the feeble successor of Mahmúd the Great, and founded that Seljukian Dynasty which finally roused Europe into the Crusades. This Nizám ul Mulk, in his Wasiyat—or Testament—which he wrote and left as a memorial for future statesmen—relates the following, as quoted in the Calcutta Review, No. 59, from Mirkhond’s History of the Assassins.

“One of the greatest of the wise men of Khorassán was the Imám Mowaffak of Naishápúr, a man highly honored and reverenced—may God rejoice his soul: his illustrious years exceeded eighty-five, and it was the universal belief that every boy who read the Koran or studied the traditions in his presence, would assuredly attain to honor and happiness. For this cause did my father send me from Tús to Naishápúr with Abd-us-samad, the doctor of law, that I might employ myself in study and learning under the guidance of that illustrious teacher. Towards me he ever turned an eye of favor and kindness, and as his pupil I felt for him extreme affection and devotion, so that I passed four years in his service. When I first came there, I found two other pupils of mine own age newly arrived, Hakim Omar Khayyám, and the ill-fated Ben Sabbáh. Both were endowed with sharpness of wit and the highest natural powers; and we three formed a close friendship together. When the Imám rose from his lectures, they used to join me, and we repeated to each other the lessons we had heard. Now Omar was a native of Naishápúr, while Hasan Ben Sabbáh’s father was one Ali, a man of austere life and practice, but heretical in his creed and doctrine. One day Hasan said to me and to Khayyám, ‘It is a universal belief that the pupils of the Imám Mowaffak will attain to fortune. Now, even if we all do not attain thereto, without doubt one of us will; what then shall be our mutual pledge and bond?’ We answered, ‘Be it what you please.’ ‘Well,’ he said, let us make a vow, that to whomsoever this fortune falls, he shall share it equally with the rest, and reserve no preeminence for himself.’ ‘Be it so,’ we both replied, and on those terms we mutually pledged our words. Years rolled on, and I went from Khorassán to Transoxiana and wandered to Ghazni and Kabul; and when I returned, I was invested with office, and rose to be administrator of affairs during the Sultanate of Sultan Alp Arslan.

“He goes on to state, that years passed by, and both his old school-friends found him out, and came and claimed a share in his good fortune, according to the school-day vow. The Vizier was generous and kept his word. Hasan demanded a place in the government, which the Sultan granted at the Vizier’s request; but discontented with a gradual rise, he plunged into the maze of intrigue of an oriental court, and, failing in a base attempt to supplant his benefactor, he was disgraced and fell. After many mishaps and wanderings, Hasan became the head of the Persian sect of the Ismailians—a party of fanatics who had long murmured in obscurity, but rose to an evil eminence under the guidance of his strong and evil will. In AD 1090, he seized the castle of Alamút, in the province of Rúdbar, which lies in the mountainous tract south of the Caspian Sea; and it was from this mountain home he obtained that evil celebrity among the Crusaders as the ‘Old Man of the Mountains,’ and spread terror through the Mohammedan world; and it is yet disputed whether the word ‘Assassin,’ which they have left in the language of modern Europe as their dark memorial, is derived from the hashish, or opiate of hemp-leaves (the Indian bhang), with which they maddened themselves to the sullen pitch of oriental desperation, or from the name of the founder of the dynasty, whom we have seen in his quiet collegiate days, at Naishápúr. One of the countless victims of the Assassin’s dagger was Nizám-ul-Mulk himself, the old schoolboy friend.

“Omar Khayyám also came to the Vizier to claim his share; but not to ask for title or office. ‘The greatest boon you can confer on me,’ he said, ‘is to let me live in a corner under the shadow of your fortune, to spread wide the advantages of Science, and pray for your long life and prosperity.’ The Vizier tells us, that when he found Omar was really sincere in his refusal, he pressed him no further, but granted him a yearly pension of 1200 mithkáls of gold from the treasury of Naishápúr.

“At Naishápúr thus lived and died Omar Khayyám, ‘busied,’ adds the Vizier, ‘in winning knowledge of every kind, and especially in Astronomy, wherein he attained to a very high preeminence. Under the Sultanate of Malik Shah, he came to Merv, and obtained great praise for his proficiency in science, and the Sultan showered favors upon him.’

“When the Malik Shah determined to reform the calendar, Omar was one of the eight learned men employed to do it; the result was the Jaláli era (so called from Jalál-ud-din, one of the King’s names)—‘a computation of time,’ says Gibbon, ‘which surpasses the Julian, and approaches the accuracy of the Gregorian style.’ He is also the author of some astronomical tables, entitled Zíji-Maliksháhí,” and the French have lately republished and translated an Arabic Treatise of his on Algebra.

“His Takhallus or poetical name (Khayyám) signifies a Tentmaker, and he is said to have at one time exercised that trade, perhaps before Nizám-ul-Mulk’s generosity raised him to independence. Many Persian poets similarly derive their names from their occupations; thus we have Attár, ‘a druggist,’ Assár, ‘an oil presser,’ etc. Omar himself alludes to his name in the following whimsical lines:—

“ ‘Khayyám, who stitched the tents of science,
Has fallen in grief’s furnace and been suddenly burned;
The shears of Fate have cut the tent ropes of his life,
And the broker of Hope has sold him for nothing!’

“We have only one more anecdote to give of his Life, and that relates to the close; it is told in the anonymous preface which is sometimes prefixed to his poems; it has been printed in the Persian in the Appendix to Hyde’s Veterum Persarum Religio, p. 499; and D’Herbelot alludes to it in his Bibliothèque, under Khiam—

“It is written in the chronicles of the ancients that this King of the Wise, Omar Khayyám, died at Naishápúr in the year of the Hegira, 517 (AD 1123); in science he was unrivaled—the very paragon of his age. Khwájah Nizámi of Samarkand, who was one of his pupils, relates the following story: ‘I often used to hold conversations with my teacher, Omar Khayyám, in a garden; and one day he said to me, “My tomb shall be in a spot where the north wind may scatter roses over it.” I wondered at the words he spake, but I knew that his were no idle words. Years after, when I chanced to revisit Naishápúr, I went to his final resting-place, and lo! it was just outside a garden, and trees laden with fruit stretched their boughs over the garden wall, and dropped their flowers upon his tomb, so that the stone was hidden under them.’ ”

Thus far—without fear of trespass—from the Calcutta Review. The writer of it, on reading in India this story of Omar’s grave, was reminded, he says, of Cicero’s account of finding Archimedes’ tomb at Syracuse, buried in grass and weeds. I think Thorwaldsen desired to have roses grow over him; a wish religiously fulfilled for him to the present day, I believe. However, to return to Omar.

Though the Sultan “shower’d favors upon him,” Omar’s Epicurean audacity of thought and speech caused him to be regarded askance in his own time and country. He is said to have been especially hated and dreaded by the Súfis, whose practise he ridiculed, and whose faith amounts to little more than his own, when stript of the mysticism and formal recognition of Islamism under which Omar would not hide. Their poets, including Háfiz, who are (with the exception of Firdausi) the most considerable in Persia, borrowed largely, indeed, of Omar’s material, but turning it to a mystical use more convenient to themselves and the people they addressed; a people quite as quick of doubt as of belief; as keen of bodily sense as of intellectual; and delighting in a cloudy composition of both, in which they could float luxuriously between Heaven and Earth, and this world and the next, on the wings of a poetical expression, that might serve indifferently for either. Omar was too honest of heart as well of head for this. Having failed (however mistakenly) of finding any providence but Destiny, and any world but this, he set about making the most of it; preferring rather to soothe the soul through the senses into acquiescence with things as he saw them, than to perplex it with vain disquietude after what they might be. It has been seen, however, that his worldly ambition was not exorbitant; and he very likely takes a humorous or perverse pleasure in exalting the gratification of sense above that of the intellect, in which he must have taken great delight, although it failed to answer the questions in which he, in common with all men, was most vitally interested.

For whatever reason, however, Omar, as before said, has never been popular in his own country, and therefore has been but scantily transmitted abroad. The manuscripts of his poems, mutilated beyond the average casualties of Oriental transcription, are so rare in the East as scarce to have reached Westward at all, in spite of all the acquisitions of arms and science. There is no copy at the India House, none at the Bibliothèque Nationale of Paris. We know but one in England: No. 140 of the Ouseley manuscripts at the Bodleian, written at Shiráz, AD 1460. This contains but 158 rubáiyát. One in the Asiatic Society’s Library at Calcutta (of which we have a copy) contains (and yet incomplete) 516, though swelled to that by all kinds of repetition and corruption. So Von Hammer speaks of his copy as containing about 200, while Dr. Sprenger catalogues the Lucknow manuscripts at double that number. The scribes, too, of the Oxford and Calcutta manuscripts seem to do their work under a sort of protest; each beginning with a tetrastich (whether genuine or not) taken out of its alphabetical order; the Oxford with one of apology; the Calcutta with one of expostulation, supposed (says a notice prefixed to the manuscript) to have arisen from a dream, in which Omar’s mother asked about his future fate. It may be rendered thus:—

“Oh Thou who burn’st in Heart for those who burn
In Hell, whose fires thyself shall feed in turn;
How long be crying, ‘Mercy on them, God!’
Why, who art Thou to teach, and He to learn?”

The Bodleian Quatrain pleads pantheism by way of justification.

“If I myself upon a looser Creed
Have loosely strung the Jewel of Good deed,
Let this one thing for my Atonement plead:
That One for Two I never did misread.”

The reviewer to whom I owe the particulars of Omar’s life concludes his review by comparing him with Lucretius, both as to natural temper and genius, and as acted upon by the circumstances in which he lived. Both indeed were men of subtle, strong, and cultivated intellect, fine imagination, and hearts passionate for truth and justice; who justly revolted from their country’s false religion, and false, or foolish, devotion to it; but who fell short of replacing what they subverted by such better hope as others, with no better revelation to guide them, had yet made a law to themselves. Lucretius indeed, with such material as Epicurus furnished, satisfied himself with the theory of a vast machine fortuitously constructed and acting by a law that implied no legislator; and so composing himself into a Stoical rather than Epicurean severity of attitude, sat down to contemplate the mechanical drama of the universe which he was part actor in; himself and all about him (as in his own sublime description of the Roman theatre) discolored with the lurid reflex of the curtain suspended between the spectator and the sun. Omar, more desperate, or more careless of any so complicated system as resulted in nothing but hopeless necessity, flung his own genius and learning with a bitter or humorous jest into the general ruin which their insufficient glimpses only served to reveal; and, pretending sensual pleasure, as the serious purpose of life, only diverted himself with speculative problems of deity, destiny, matter and spirit, good and evil, and other such questions, easier to start than to run down, and the pursuit of which becomes a very weary sport at last!

With regard to the present translation. The original rubáiyát (as, missing an Arabic guttural, these tetrastichs are more musically called) are independent stanzas, consisting each of four lines of equal though varied prosody; sometimes all rhyming, but oftener (as here imitated) the third line a blank. Somewhat as in the Greek Alcaic, where the penultimate line seems to lift and suspend the wave that falls over in the last. As usual with such kind of Oriental verse, the rubáiyát follow one another according to alphabetic rhyme—a strange succession of grave and gay. Those here selected are strung into something of an eclogue, with perhaps a less than equal proportion of the “drink and make-merry,” which (genuine or not) recurs over-frequently in the original. Either way, the result is sad enough: saddest perhaps when most ostentatiously merry: more apt to move sorrow than anger toward the old Tentmaker, who, after vainly endeavoring to unshackle his steps from destiny, and to catch some authentic glimpse of tomorrow, fell back upon today (which has outlasted so many tomorrows!) as the only ground he had got to stand upon, however momentarily slipping from under his feet.

While the second edition of this version of Omar was preparing, Monsieur Nicolas, French Consul at Resht, published a very careful and very good edition of the text from a lithograph copy at Tehran, comprising 464 rubáiyát, with translation and notes of his own.

Monsieur Nicolas, whose edition has reminded me of several things, and instructed me in others, does not consider Omar to be the material Epicurean that I have literally taken him for, but a mystic, shadowing the Deity under the figure of Wine, Wine-bearer, etc., as Háfiz is supposed to do; in short, a Súfi poet like Háfiz and the rest.

I cannot see reason to alter my opinion, formed as it was more than a dozen years ago when Omar was first shown me by one to whom I am indebted for all I know of Oriental, and very much of other, literature. He admired Omar’s genius so much that he would gladly have adopted any such interpretation of his meaning as M. Nicolas’ if he could. That he could not, appears by his paper in the Calcutta Review already so largely quoted; in which he argues from the poems themselves, as well as from what records remain of the poet’s life.

And if more were needed to disprove Monsieur Nicolas’ theory, there is the biographical notice which he himself has drawn up in direct contradiction to the interpretation of the poems given in his notes. (See pp. xiii–xiv of his preface.) Indeed I hardly knew poor Omar was so far gone till his apologist informed me. For here we see that, whatever were the wine that Háfiz drank and sang, the veritable juice of the grape it was which Omar used, not only when carousing with his friends, but (says Monsieur Nicolas) in order to excite himself to that pitch of devotion which others reached by cries and “Hurlemens.” And yet, whenever Wine, Wine-bearer, etc., occur in the text—which is often enough—Monsieur Nicolas carefully annotates “Dieu,” “La Divinité,” etc.: so carefully indeed that one is tempted to think that he was indoctrinated by the Súfi with whom he read the poems. A Persian would naturally wish to vindicate a distinguished countryman; and a Súfi to enrol him in his own sect, which already comprises all the chief poets of Persia.

What historical authority has Monsieur Nicolas to show that Omar gave himself up “avec passion à l’étude de la philosophie des Soufis?” (Preface, p. xiii.) The doctrines of pantheism, materialism, necessity, etc., were not peculiar to the Súfi; nor to Lucretius before them; nor to Epicurus before him; probably the very original irreligion of thinking men from the first; and very likely to be the spontaneous growth of a philosopher living in an age of social and political barbarism, under shadow of one of the two and seventy religions supposed to divide the world. Von Hammer (according to Sprenger’s Oriental Catalogue) speaks of Omar as “a freethinker, and a great opponent of Sufism;” perhaps because, while holding much of their doctrine, he would not pretend to any inconsistent severity of morals. Sir W. Ouseley has written a note to something of the same effect on the flyleaf of the Bodleian manuscript. And in two rubáiyát of Monsieur Nicolas’ own edition Súf and Súfi are both disparagingly named.

No doubt many of these quatrains seem unaccountable unless mystically interpreted; but many more as unaccountable unless literally. Were the wine spiritual, for instance, how wash the body with it when dead? Why make cups of the dead clay to be filled with—“La Divinité”—by some succeeding mystic? Monsieur Nicolas himself is puzzled by some “bizarres” and “trop Orientals” allusions and images—“d’une sensualité quelquefois révoltante” indeed—which “les convenances” do not permit him to translate, but still which the reader cannot but refer to “La Divinité.” No doubt also many of the quatrains in the Tehran, as in the Calcutta copies, are spurious; such rubáiyát being the common form of epigram in Persia. But this, at best, tells as much one way as another; nay, the Súfi, who may be considered the scholar and man of Letters in Persia, would be far more likely than the careless Epicure to interpolate what favors his own view of the poet. I observe that very few of the more mystical quatrains are in the Bodleian manuscript which must be one of the oldest, as dated at Shiraz, AH 865, AD 1460. And this, I think, especially distinguishes Omar (I cannot help calling him by his—no, not Christian—familiar name) from all other Persian poets: That, whereas with them the poet is lost in his song, the man in allegory and abstraction; we seem to have the man—the Bonhomme—Omar himself, with all his humors and passions, as frankly before us as if we were really at table with him, after the wine had gone round.

I must say that I, for one, never wholly believed in the mysticism of Háfiz. It does not appear there was any danger in holding and singing Súfi pantheism, so long as the poet made his salaam to Mohammed at the beginning and end of his song. Under such conditions Jeláluddín, Jámí, Attár, and others sang; using wine and beauty indeed as images to illustrate, not as a mask to hide, the divinity they were celebrating. Perhaps some allegory less liable to mistake or abuse had been better among so inflammable a people: much more so when, as some think with Háfiz and Omar, the abstract is not only likened to, but identified with, the sensual image; hazardous, if not to the devotee himself, yet to his weaker brethren; and worse for the profane in proportion as the devotion of the initiated grew warmer. And all for what? To be tantalized with images of sensual enjoyment which must be renounced if one would approximate a God, who, according to the doctrine, is sensual matter as well as spirit, and into whose universe one expects unconsciously to merge after death, without hope of any posthumous beatitude in another world to compensate for all one’s self-denial in this. Lucretius’ blind divinity certainly merited, and probably got, as much self-sacrifice as this of the Súfi; and the burden of Omar’s song—if not “let us eat”—is assuredly—“let us drink, for tomorrow we die!” And if Háfiz meant quite otherwise by a similar language, he surely miscalculated when he devoted his life and genius to so equivocal a psalmody as, from his day to this, has been said and sung by any rather than spiritual worshipers.

However, as there is some traditional presumption, and certainly the opinion of some learned men, in favor of Omar’s being a Súfi—and even something of a saint—those who please may so interpret his Wine and Cup-bearer. On the other hand, as there is far more historical certainty of his being a philosopher, of scientific insight and ability far beyond that of the age and country he lived in; of such moderate worldly ambition as becomes a philosopher, and such moderate wants as rarely satisfy a debauchee; other readers may be content to believe with me that, while the wine Omar celebrates is simply the juice of the grape, he bragged more than he drank of it, in very defiance perhaps of that spiritual wine which left its votaries sunk in hypocrisy or disgust.

I

Wake! For the Sun, who scatter’d into flight
The Stars before him from the Field of Night,
Drives Night along with them from Heav’n, and strikes
The Sultán’s Turret with a Shaft of Light.

II

Before the phantom of False morning died,
Methought a Voice within the Tavern cried,
“When all the Temple is prepared within,
Why nods the drowsy Worshipper outside?”

III

And, as the Cock crew, those who stood before
The Tavern shouted—“Open then the Door!
You know how little while we have to stay,
And, once departed, may return no more.”

IV

Now the New Year reviving old Desires,
The thoughtful Soul to Solitude retires,
Where the White Hand of Moses on the Bough
Puts out, and Jesus from the Ground suspires.

V

Iram indeed is gone with all his Rose,
And Jamshýd’s Sev’n-ring’d Cup where no one knows;
But still a Ruby kindles in the Vine,
And many a Garden by the Water blows.

VI

And David’s lips are lockt; but in divine
High-piping Pehleví, with “Wine! Wine! Wine!
Red Wine!”—the Nightingale cries to the Rose
That sallow cheek of hers t’ incarnadine.