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Whether his version of the Rubaiyat, with its sensuous fatalism, its ridicule of asceticism and renunciation, and its bewildering kaleidoscope of mysticism that becomes materialist and materialism that becomes mystical, has not indirectly had influences, practical and literary, the results of which would have been more abhorrent to FitzGerald than to almost any one else, may be suggested.
The clouds hug the far sides of the nearest ridges and shut you in, above and around. It must have been such a day as this when Fitzgerald made that line of the Rubaiyat read: "And this inverted bowl they call the sky." Today the bowl seems very small and dreary. By and by a snowflake falls, then a few others, soft as the spray of the thistle in the early days of October.
This work is a poem called "Lucretius on Life and Death," and was partly suggested by the vogue acquired by Fitzgerald's rendering of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam. The doctrine of Omar is, as everybody knows, a doctrine of voluptuous pessimism. There is no life other than this. Let us kiss and drink while it lasts.
Thereafter turning his attention to Persian, he produced , anonymously, his famous translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám. He also pub. translations of the Agamemnon of Æschylus, and the Oedipus Tyrannus and Oedipus Coloneus of Sophocles.
I said 'Damn! And I'll say it again." She leaned on my shoulder and laughed for a second. Then: "I'm sure you wouldn't find that in the Rubaiyat." "Perhaps Thou didn't have to be back in time for dinner." She fell to work again, but I could see she was smiling. The loose pieces left were very few now.
Omar Khayyam, so grossly misunderstood, sang of this liberated man in his immortal scripture, the RUBAIYAT: "Ah, Moon of my Delight who know'st no wane, The Moon of Heav'n is rising once again; How oft hereafter rising shall she look Through this same Garden after me-in vain!" The "Moon of Delight" is God, eternal Polaris, anachronous never.
The poet Omar Khayyam, in moralizing over the ruins of the fallen splendour of that famous place, speaks in Fitzgerald's 'Rubaiyat': 'They say the lion and the lizard keep The Court where Jamshed gloried and drank deep.
For instance, we brought out Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, an essay by Emerson, and another by Thoreau. Our Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam was Heron-Allen's translation of the original MS in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, which, though less poetical than FitzGerald's, was not so common. Several years ago we began to publish the works of our own members.
Boston and London, 1903. "Cathedrals of Southern France." In collaboration with Francis Miltoun. Sold for publication in London and Boston, 1904. "A Dante Calendar." London, 1903. "A Rubaiyat Calendar." Boston, 1903. "The King's Classics." A Calendar. Sold in London for 1904. Furnival, Professor Skeat, and Israel Gollancz.
So the Hermit died of remorse, and one cannot say, with Walton, "and I hope the reader is sorry." The "other poems" are vague memories of Shelley, or anticipations of Poe. One of them is curiously styled "Her, a Statue," and contains a passage that reminds us of a rubaiyat of Omar's, "She might see A love-wing'd Seraph glide in glory by, Striking the tent of its mortality.
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