Title: The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam Author: Omar Khayyam (Ghiyath al-Din Abu'l-Fath Umar ibn Ibrahim al-Khayyam) Creation Date: c. late 11th - early 12th century Location: Persia
Summary
The Rubaiyat is a collection of rubai (quatrains) — four-line poems with an AABA or AAAA rhyme scheme — attributed to the polymath Omar Khayyam, who was primarily a mathematician and astronomer. The poems circle obsessively around a few themes: the brevity of life, the certainty of death, the impossibility of knowing what comes after, the futility of worldly ambition, and the imperative to seize the present moment with wine, companionship, and beauty. "The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, / Moves on" — the image of inexorable cosmic indifference runs through the poems like a bass note. The tone oscillates between hedonistic defiance and metaphysical anguish: Khayyam is not simply celebrating pleasure but insisting on it as the only rational response to a universe that offers no answers.
Why This Book Matters
The Rubaiyat occupies a unique position in world literature as a work that exists in two distinct forms, each of enormous cultural significance. In Persian, the quatrains attributed to Khayyam represent a tradition of philosophical scepticism and intellectual dissent within Islamic civilisation — proof that the medieval Islamic world was capacious enough to contain voices of doubt, hedonism, and materialist critique alongside its mystics and theologians. In English, FitzGerald's 1859 adaptation became one of the most popular and influential poems of the Victorian era and introduced millions of English readers to Persian literature. The Rubaiyat challenges the assumption that pre-modern Middle Eastern literature was uniformly religious and mystical; many quatrains in the Khayyam corpus are bracingly sceptical, worldly, and at times near-nihilistic, even if the textual tradition as a whole remains unstable and often ambiguous.
Historical Context
Omar Khayyam lived in Nishapur and Isfahan in the late 11th and early 12th centuries, during the Seljuk period. He was primarily known in his lifetime not as a poet but as a brilliant mathematician (he classified and solved cubic equations) and astronomer (he helped reform the Persian calendar). The quatrains attributed to him may have been composed casually, as an intellectual's private reflections, and were collected and expanded over the centuries — the authenticity of any given rubai is a matter of scholarly debate. The intellectual world he inhabited was one of intense philosophical activity: the great theologian al-Ghazali was his contemporary, and the tension between philosophy, mysticism, and orthodox theology was the central intellectual drama of the age.
Literary Significance
The rubai form — four half-lines with a monorhyme — is the most compressed poetic structure in Persian literature, and Khayyam exploits its compression brilliantly. Each quatrain is a self-contained argument, a miniature philosophical essay that arrives at its conclusion with the force of an epigram. The cumulative effect of reading many rubai in sequence creates a distinctive emotional texture: a steady, drumbeat insistence on mortality that is at once darkly funny and genuinely harrowing. FitzGerald's English adaptation, while taking enormous liberties with the Persian originals, created a poem of extraordinary beauty and coherence that is itself a major work of English literature — a rare case where translation transcends its source to become an independent masterpiece.
Research Notes
The Rubaiyat was included to represent both the Persian quatrain tradition and the remarkable case of cross-cultural literary transmission that FitzGerald's translation embodies. The scholarly challenge with Khayyam is the authenticity question: the number of rubai attributed to him ranges from about 100 in the earliest manuscripts to over 1,000 in later compilations. Many quatrains ascribed to him were likely composed by others. The Avery and Heath-Stubbs translation is the most reliable for the Persian originals. FitzGerald's version, though more adaptation than translation, remains indispensable as a literary phenomenon in its own right.
The Reading
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 Sultan's Turret with a Shaft of Light.
The sun is up over Nishapur, that old city of the Khurasan road where I was schooled in numbers and stars, and over Isfahan, where the Seljuk court paid an astronomer to reckon the calendar straight — and it is the same sun, no younger and no older, that rose over the towers of every king who is now dust. Take notice of the verb: the sun strikes the sultan's turret. It does not flatter it; it does not spare it; it strikes it as a hammer strikes a coin. So begins the day, and so begins this little catalogue of quatrains which I have set down at odd hours between the labours of geometry and the demands of the cup — small four-line affairs, the rubai, in which a man may set out the whole of his unease before the wine has cooled in the jug.
Hear, then, what one such night and one such morning have taught me.
Come, fill the Cup, and in the fire of Spring Your Winter-garment of Repentance fling: The Bird of Time has but a little way To flutter — and the Bird is on the Wing.
Repentance is a heavy coat, useful in cold seasons. Now the almond is in flower and the snow gone from the hills, and the bird that men call Time — small, bright, careless of our affairs — has already lifted from the branch and is half across the courtyard. Hold the cup. Drink. The bird does not come back at the call of any creature, however learned, however devout.
You will ask: is this not a kind of impiety? It may be. I have read the Doctors and I have read the Saints, and I have read also the columns of figures by which one tracks the planets through their houses, and the conclusion to which all my reading has brought me is this — that the universe runs by a clock to which we have not been shown the dial.
Concerning the Potter and his Wheel
In a certain workshop on the road out of Nishapur there sits a potter who shapes vessels of clay all day on a turning wheel. He is paid little and he sings while he works. I have stood watching him for an hour together and listened, in my own head, to what his pots might say to one another in the cool of the shelf where they wait to be sold. Here, then, is the talk of the pots.
Said one among them — "Surely not in vain My substance of the common Earth was ta'en And to this Figure moulded, to be broke, Or trampled back to shapeless Earth again."
A reasonable pot. It objects, with proper civility, that surely the labour of making was not wasted. It would prefer some account of why it was raised up out of the dust if it must be returned to the dust before sundown. None of us have ever received such an account; the pot does not expect one either; but it is right to ask.
After a momentary silence spake Some Vessel of a more ungainly Make; "They sneer at me for leaning all awry: What! did the Hand then of the Potter shake?"
This second pot is my favourite. It is misshapen — the bystanders mock its tilt — and it asks the only question that the bystanders ought to feel ashamed for not having asked themselves. If the potter is omnipotent, what excuses the slope of his vessel? If the maker's hand was steady, why does the pot lean? You may answer this question if you can. I have given it a long life of thought and I have only ever found one answer worth setting down, which is: the potter is not telling, and the pot must lean as it leans.
And as for me, who long sat upon that shelf with my fellow vessels, listening:
Indeed the Idols I have loved so long Have done my credit in this World much wrong: Have drown'd my Glory in a shallow Cup, And sold my Reputation for a Song.
I admit the indictment cheerfully. Wine, and the friend across the table, and the line of verse running through the head at the wrong moment — these have cost me the standing I might have had among the grave men of the academies. So be it. The grave men, too, end in the same earth, and they take with them no song.
Concerning a Certain Finger
There is one quatrain that I have set down twice in two different inks because I cannot bear to lose it. Here it is.
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.
Whatever you did at noon today is now in the book that no one reads aloud. You cannot revise the entry. You cannot pray it out; you cannot reason it out; you cannot weep it out. The three doors are all locked from the other side. Piety closes; Wit closes; Tears close. The Finger writes on.
I will say this for the Finger: it has the merit of consistency. It does not write your line and then erase someone else's; it does not favour the rich man over the poor man, the believer over the doubter, the scholar over the donkey-driver. It writes them all, and it moves on. The universe does its work without consulting any of us. There is a certain peace to be had from this, if you can find it. It is the peace of accepting that the score is settled before the game begins. After that, you may play as you like.
Concerning the Wine and the Beloved
Some of my fellow Persians, when they speak of wine, mean the wine of the Beloved, the intoxication of divine love; some, when they speak of the Beloved, mean only wine. I will not draw the line for you. The line is fine, the cup is small, and the night is going.
A Book of Verses underneath the Bough, A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread — and Thou Beside me singing in the Wilderness — Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!
A tree. A book. Something to drink. Something to eat. A companion who sings. I am not asking for the gardens of the next world. I am noting that, if the next world is contested and the present one is brief, then five small things are enough — and that the wilderness of the present, with these five things in it, is the only paradise of which I have any certain knowledge. The theologians may take this as they please.
And much as Wine has play'd the Infidel, And robb'd me of my Robe of Honour — Well, I wonder often what the Vintners buy One half so precious as the stuff they sell.
A small wonder, but I have never been able to put it down. The wine-merchant, having taken my coin in exchange for the jug, walks home with the coin. What does he do with it? What does he buy that is worth as much as the thing he sold? I have watched him in the bazaar with his purchases, and I have seen nothing in his basket that would persuade me he came out ahead. Yet he counts himself the cleverer. So it goes in the markets of the unwise.
Concerning the Sky
In my other life I am a man of the astrolabe. I have spent many nights with the great instrument of brass, fixing the position of stars and reckoning the angle of the meridian for the use of the Seljuk Sultan and his calendars. I know the heavens as the camel-driver knows his road. And what I have learned from them, I will tell you now.
And that inverted Bowl they call the Sky, Whereunder crawling coop'd we live and die, Lift not your hands to It for help — for It As impotently moves as you or I.
The sky is a bowl turned upside down over us. The bowl moves; we move; neither of us is conducting the orchestra. Lift your hands to it if you like — many do — but do not be surprised when the bowl gives no sign. The bowl is not withholding help out of cruelty. It has no help to withhold. It is doing what it does because it cannot do otherwise, which is the predicament of bowls, of men, and of every visible thing.
Up from Earth's Centre through the Seventh Gate I rose, and on the Throne of Saturn sate, And many a Knot unravel'd by the Road; But not the Master-knot of Human Fate.
I have, in my own books, made the journey from the lowest sphere to the highest — out through the seven planetary spheres which the ancients fixed above the earth, up to the cold ring of Saturn at the limit of the visible world. Along the way I have unpicked many a knotted problem. The cubic equation, which had defeated my masters, came apart under my fingers. The reform of the calendar, which had vexed the court, was settled. But the great knot — why we are here, where we go, whether the going is into a hand that holds us or into a dust that does not notice — that knot I never untied. I tugged at it for fifty years. It is still tied.
Concerning the Caravanserai
The world is an inn at a crossroads. The travellers come; they unload their camels; they eat and drink in the courtyard; they rise in the dark and load again and ride out before the heat of the day. The next caravan arrives at dusk. The inn-keeper grows rich and dies; another inn-keeper takes his place; the inn is the same inn.
Think, in this batter'd Caravanserai Whose Portals are alternate Night and Day, How Sultan after Sultan with his Pomp Abode his destined Hour, and went his way.
I have lived under more than one sultan. I have seen the procession come into the city — the drums, the horses, the standards, the ranks of the slave-soldiers, the gold on the harness — and I have seen, not so very many years later, the funeral come out the other gate, with the standards drooping and the drums muffled. The portals of the inn are Night and Day. Every sultan abides his destined hour. None of them argues with the bill at the end of the stay.
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, but cannot break his Sleep.
You will know the names. Jamshid was the legendary king of Persia, whose cup was said to show the seven heavens, whose reign in the old stories was the golden age before the fall — the same Jamshid celebrated in our Book of Kings, the Shahnameh. His palaces are pasture for the lizard now, and the lion lairs in his audience-hall. Bahram Gur was the Sasanian king, the great hunter who pursued the wild ass — gur in our tongue — across the plains of his empire, and from whom the beast got the second half of its name. He hunted his last ass and lay down to sleep. Over his head, in the grass above his grave, the wild ass now stamps and grazes — and Bahram does not stir. The hunter becomes the ground the hunted walks on. There is no moral. There is only the fact.
Concerning my own enquiries
I will be honest with you, because I am too old for the other thing.
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 where in I went.
I sat in the lecture-halls of the philosophers — the Doctors of reason — and I sat at the feet of the theologians and the holy men — the Saints. I listened well. I asked the questions that an honest student is supposed to ask. The arguments went round and round, about it and about, and at the end of every long evening I rose from my place and walked out into the same street I had walked in from, no wiser than when I sat down. I do not say their arguments were worthless; I say only that they did not settle the matter. The matter is not, I begin to suspect, the kind of matter that argument can settle.
And if the Wine you drink, the Lip you press, End in what All begins and ends in — Yes — Think then you are To-day what Yesterday You were — To-morrow you shall not be less.
A small piece of cold arithmetic, this one. Everything ends in the same end. The wine you drink and the lip you press end where the king's reign and the beggar's hunger end — in dust. Very well. If that is the equation, then your existence today is no less real than it was yesterday; and tomorrow, when the equation closes upon you, you will not have been less for having lived. Pleasure is not made trivial by being brief. It is only made precious.
Concerning what is left
I have been a mathematician and an astronomer; I have served sultans and I have buried friends; I have spent more evenings in the wine-shop than I will now confess on paper; and I have come, at the end of all of it, to a few small certainties and a great many uncertainties, and the uncertainties are the larger company.
This much I will set down. The Cup is in the hand for an evening. The Beloved is across the table, or under the bough, for a season. The Bird of Time is on the wing. The Moving Finger writes and goes. The inverted Bowl says nothing. The Master-knot does not loosen. Jamshid is grass, Bahram is grass, the lecture-halls open and close, and the wine-merchant counts his coin in a market that will be dust before he has spent it.
Therefore: do not lift your hands to the bowl for an answer it has not got. Do not wait for the Finger to reverse itself. Do not stake the evening on the morning. Pour the wine you have, sing while there is voice for it, sit under the tree while the tree stands, and love the companion who is beside you for as long as you and she are in the same wilderness. The next world may or may not exist. The present one is leaving the room as we speak.
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.
This post is part of Civilisations, a 149-book chronological journey through world literature. See the full collection →
Two editions of FitzGerald's adaptation are recommended. Daniel Karlin's Oxford World's Classics edition is the scholarly standard — critically edited, with extensive notes on the Persian originals and the history of FitzGerald's revisions across five editions. The Dover Thrift Edition offers FitzGerald's complete text in an inexpensive, accessible format. For the Persian originals, Peter Avery and John Heath-Stubbs's Penguin Classics translation (ISBN 0140443843) is the scholarly standard.
Adapted by Edward FitzGerald, edited by Daniel Karlin. The critically edited scholarly standard — with notes on the Persian originals and FitzGerald's five successive revisions.
Adapted by Edward FitzGerald. The complete text in an inexpensive Dover edition — ideal for readers who simply want the poem.
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