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[Note: This is a pre-copyedited, author-produced PDF of an article published as “FitzGerald and the Rubáiyát, In and Out of Time,” Victorian Poetry 46 (2008), 1- 14.] FitzGerald and the Rubáiyát, In and Out of Time Erik Gray This issue of Victorian Poetry commemorates a double anniversary: March 31, 2009, marks both the bicentennial of the birth of Edward FitzGerald and the sesquicentennial of his Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, which was published (give or take a few days) on the poet’s fiftieth birthday.i It is quite fitting that we should celebrate this occasion and at the same time quite ironic. FitzGerald’s poem, after all, seeks to do away with commemoration, and even with time itself: it enjoins the reader to think only of today, abjuring all consideration of past and future. FitzGerald himself moreover, who never liked birthdays in any case, certainly did not celebrate this one. His dearest friend, William Kenworthy Browne, to whom FitzGerald had been passionately attached ever since their first meeting twenty-seven years earlier, had died only the day before.ii Browne was still a young man – he had been only sixteen when he met FitzGerald – and his death was the result of an accident. As FitzGerald described it in a letter to Tennyson, while Browne was “Coming home from hunting the end of January, his Horse was kicked by another: reared, and her hind Legs slipping under her, she fell over and on him, crushing all the middle of his Body. He lived two months with a Patience and Vitality that would have left most Men to die in a Week … and then gave up his Ghost” (Letters 2:333). Hence it is understandable that, on the day it was published, FitzGerald was thinking very little about his new poem. Yet the Rubáiyát is not entirely unrelated to the 2 death of Browne: FitzGerald’s letters from these weeks frequently echo the poem’s central motifs, as he himself recognized. Writing a month later about his attempts to reconcile himself to his loss, FitzGerald mentions “poor old Omar who has his kind of Consolation for all these Things” (Letters 2:334).iii The letters about Browne share the deep melancholy and resignation of the Rubáiyát, and above all its sense that time has no meaning. Hurrying to Browne’s house as soon as he heard of the accident, FitzGerald was not at first admitted to the dying man’s bedside, until [P]oor fellow, he tried to write a line to me – like a Child’s! – and I went – and saw – no longer the gay Lad, nor the healthy Man, I had known: but a wreck of all that: a Face like Charles I (after decapitation almost) above the Clothes: and the poor shattered Body underneath lying as it had lain eight weeks – such a case as the Doctor says he had never known. Instead of the light utterance of other days too, came the slow painful syllables in a far lower Key: and when the old familiar Words – “Old Fellow – Fitz” – etc., came forth so spoken, I broke down too in spite of foregone Resolution. (Letters 2:328) Time here, like the body, has been horribly compressed: the handwriting of a child, the body of a broken old man, and the head of a corpse exist simultaneously. Browne’s life span has been both unnaturally drawn out – the suffering that would have lasted a week in any other man here lingers for two months – and also extraordinarily foreshortened: FitzGerald recognizes that the friend he had always loved for his youthfulness has suddenly overtaken him and become the elder of the two.iv The words that Browne speaks are the “old familiar Words” of the “Lad,” but spoken now in the “far lower Key” of maturity. 3 A few days later FitzGerald describes his final interview with his friend in much the same terms, concluding, “Oh, the last words he wrote too were to me on Thursday Morning – in the Hand of a Child’s First Attempt – to ask me to go to him. ‘I love you very – whenever – WKB’” (Letters 2:239). Browne’s hovering “whenever” is as accurate as it is touching. Time has ceased to operate for him: his “last words” appear in the guise of a “Child’s First Attempt,” so that beginning and ending are fused. The situation strangely recalls one of the quatrains of FitzGerald’s poem, published that same day but written well before: “With Earth’s first Clay They did the Last Man’s knead, / And then of the Last Harvest sow’d the Seed: / Yea, the first Morning of Creation wrote / What the Last Dawn of Reckoning shall read” (1st edn., st. 53). Even more uncannily, FitzGerald seems to have foreseen Browne’s early death: writing to a friend in 1839, when Browne was only twenty-three (the same age FitzGerald had been when they met), FitzGerald predicts with unsettling accuracy, “Perhaps also [Browne] will not be long to be looked at; for there are signs of decay about him: and his very perfection of nature somehow forebodes a short continuance: and as dramatists are said to prematurely kill such characters as they find it difficult to sustain, so it is that Nature cannot or will not carry on her finest creations through the five acts” (Letters 1:225-26). The words written twenty years earlier had come true. FitzGerald’s letter to Tennyson describing Browne’s death was composed less than a week after the event. It is appropriate that FitzGerald should have turned to Tennyson at this moment, not only because Tennyson was a dear friend and himself a great elegist of lost love, but because the relationship between the two poets similarly seemed to exist outside of time. They preserved their affection from early days through 4 decades of separation, so that when Tennyson appeared suddenly at FitzGerald’s home in 1876, “immediately it was as if we had parted only twenty days instead of twenty years: with our old Jokes, Banter, Comparisons of Taste, etc.” (Letters 3:705). FitzGerald, meanwhile, also seemed to possess the ability to foresee his friend’s future career. In 1842, while helping Tennyson prepare the proofs of the two-volume Poems that would permanently establish his reputation, FitzGerald augured that “with all his faults, he will publish such a volume as has not been published since the time of Keats: and which, once published, will never be suffered to die. This is my prophecy: for I live before Posterity” (Letters 1:315). FitzGerald’s prediction seems obvious enough now with the advantage of hindsight, but it was not clear to Tennyson himself, who was full of doubt and “wish[ing] he had never been persuaded to print.” Moreover, FitzGerald’s allusion to the Fool’s speech in King Lear – “This prophecy Merlin shall make, for I live before his time” – has a double effect. Not only is it typically self-deprecating (casting FitzGerald as Fool to Tennyson’s Lear, and reducing the Fool’s metatheatric final flourish to simple tautology), but it reinforces the sense that FitzGerald views his friend’s poetry sub specie aeternitatis, from the vantage point of an eternal present. FitzGerald would have liked to consider his own poetry the same way, ignoring “Unborn TO-MORROW, and dead YESTERDAY” (1st edn., st. 37). But of course the Rubáiyát has not been exempt from the effects of time. The past fifty years for instance, which are the focus of this introduction (and of the bibliography that follows), have seen dramatic fluctuations in the poem’s reputation, both with the general public and among professional critics. The Rubáiyát continues to be widely reprinted and read, but it does not possess nearly the popular currency that it still had fifty years ago. Whereas it was 5 once a poem that people might quote without even knowing that they were doing so – it was so often cited (and also parodied) that parts of the poem had simply entered into English speech – it has now largely disappeared from public view.v This change is mostly attributable to the fact that familiarity with poetry in general has drastically declined: it is debatable whether any other poem has taken the place of the Rubáiyát in the popular imagination, or whether any lyric poem will ever again become so well known. The change then is not specific to the Rubáiyát; yet it fits in quite neatly with the larger history of the poem’s critical reception, which has always been a story of precipitous reversals of fortune. The tale of the poem’s original discovery has passed into myth,vi and so to some extent has the story of the hundred years that followed. According to the standard reception history, starting in 1859 the Rubáiyát first languished in unjust obscurity, then rose to disproportionate fame by the turn of the century, only to suffer a critical backlash in the first half of the twentieth century. This version of events, with its balanced three-part structure, is attractive, only rather oversimplified.vii In the first place, the poem’s original period of obscurity has been greatly exaggerated. As Frank Kermode writes, “The Rubáiyát didn’t lie unread for long.”viii The truly surprising thing is not that the work was at first ignored, but that in just over two years an anonymous poem, published by a specialty bookseller as a paper-covered pamphlet, had already managed to cause a literary stir. The story of the poem’s rapid rise to international celebrity, on the other hand, is quite true: by the end of the nineteenth century it had become by far the best known and most popular poem in the English language.ix But the subsequent reaction has, like the initial period of obscurity, been exaggerated, or at least misunderstood.