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Tomorrow morning there will be many bright, new blossoms, their nectar crying to the bees, like the voice in Omar Khayyam's tavern to those outside the door: "When all the temple is prepared within, Why lags the drowsy worshiper outside?"
We find attraction, at times, even in a poetry of revolt against them; in a poetry which might take for its motto Omar Khayyám's words: "Let us make up in the tavern for the time which we have wasted in the mosque." Or we find attractions in a poetry indifferent to them; in a poetry where the contents may be what they will, but where the form is studied and exquisite.
The extracts follow: A few verses of Omar Khayyam's poetry have just been read to me, and I feel as if I had spent the last half-hour in a magnificent sepulcher. Yes, it is a tomb in which hope, joy and the power of acting nobly lie buried.
Khayyam, Omar J. Born 1050 A.D., educated privately and at Bagdad University. Represented Persia in the Olympic Games of 1072, winning the sitting high-jump and the egg-and-spoon race. The Khayyams were quite a well-known family in Bagdad, and there was a lot of talk when Omar, who was Mrs Khayyam's pet son, took to drink writing poetry.
But a great philosophical unity links the three in an evil bond. Omar Khayyam's wine-bibbing is bad, not because it is wine-bibbing. It is bad, and very bad, because it is medical wine-bibbing. It is the drinking of a man who drinks because he is not happy. His is the wine that shuts out the universe, not the wine that reveals it.
Osgood and Company were obliged to send for him three times, and most urgently, before he could be persuaded to come. "I hasten to thank thee, dear Mrs. , for thy kind note, and accompanying flowers, wreathing like Hafiz on Omar Khayyam's roses, the wine not of Shiraz, but of storied Andalusia. "I am not accustomed to tarry long at the wine in this case I shall remember Paul's advice to Timothy.
I had resolved No age should come on me ere youth was spent, For I would wear myself out, Omar Khayyam's While you live Drink! for once dead you never shall return, Swinburne's cry of despair, show that in a revulsion from the asceticism of the puritan, no less than in a revulsion from the stupidity of the plain man, it may become easy for the poet to carry his carpe diem philosophy very far.
Yes, certainly: Read books that come to stay the kind of books you would like to be as a man. The Rubaiyat would deserve mention but for the danger of misunderstanding its message. Rightly read Omar Khayyam's lesson is serenity and poise and that power and happiness which come from these. The disciple of the tent-maker is not apt to lose his bearings.
*Contigo pan y cebolla*: the Spanish version for 'love in a cottage' has many parallels. Cf. for example two such widely different sources as Prov. xv, 17: "Better a dinner of herbs where love is...," and Omar Khayyam's "A book of verses" etc.
Three deep ravines were traversed before we made the final upward movement, and then Nature's lamp lights were being shut out in hundreds at a time as the soft dawn began to diffuse itself. With Dawn's left hand in the sky, we thought of Omar Khayyam's stanza, and felt impelled to cry out to the sleepers in the hollow
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