[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. 6

Popular enthusiasm for the poem did elicit critical resistance, but the criticism was almost entirely directed, not at the poem itself, but at its devotees – at the self-indulgent excesses of the Omar Khayyám Clubs in both England and America, or at publishers’ over- elaborate illustrated editions. In an 1899 article on “Kipling and FitzGerald,” for instance, Paul Elmer More expressed frustration with the public’s idolization of those two authors; when he reprinted the article in 1907, however, More added an apologetic footnote: “As regards FitzGerald, I feel, in reading over these pages, that the silly talk of the day led me to pass too lightly over the extraordinary beauty and humanity of his work.”x

In 1930 George Saintsbury – by his own account “a critic … not given to reckless superlative” – wrote that depreciation of the Rubáiyát would be “nearly the ‘vilest’ of all things in the double sense of ‘cheapest’ and ‘most disgusting’.”xi In other words, it had now become as vulgar to dismiss the poem as it once was to admire it. The one major critic from the first half of the twentieth century who did continually belittle the poem was T. S. Eliot. By his own account, Eliot first experienced a vocation for poetry when he discovered the Rubáiyát at the age of fourteen, but then, after a period of intense enthusiasm, eventually outgrew it. Eliot’s experience thus seems to reproduce typologically the tripartite structure of the larger myth, from ignorance to admiration to disregard. Yet Eliot’s self-account may be somewhat misleading: as Vinnie-Marie

D’Ambrosio has shown, Eliot continued throughout his career to be haunted by the

Rubáiyát, even as he claimed publicly to have put it behind him.xii

A century after its publication, then, the Rubáiyát continued to be read with great admiration by most critics. Its fortunes over the past fifty years, however, have been 7 more checkered. To mark the poem’s centennial in 1959, A. J. Arberry, a scholar of

Persian, published an edition of the Rubáiyát that reprinted the first version, together with an extensive introduction and notes showing how FitzGerald’s poem emerged from the

Persian sources at his disposal. Arberry’s volume is intended as a celebration, yet from its opening pages it seems curiously anxious to defend FitzGerald against putative detractors. The Acknowledgments page reads more like an apologia, as if Arberry were conscious of an imminent critical reaction against the poem and its author. Arberry explains, for instance, that one of the chief aims of his project has been “to show

[FitzGerald] a greater man than the pardonable enthusiasm of some of his more undiscriminating admirers has suggested.”xiii He is also quick to pre-empt possible objections to FitzGerald’s methods of translation, pointing out that FitzGerald publicly disclaimed any attempt to be literal, and thus “justly forestalled all petty and pedantic criticism.”xiv

When the negative reaction that Arberry seemed to feel impending actually arrived, it took an unexpected, and dual, form – on the one hand diffuse and unemphatic, on the other acute, hysterical, and nasty. The former and more important reaction consisted of simple critical neglect. Over the next twenty years, just when critics were busy resuscitating the reputations of other Victorian poets, the Rubáiyát disappeared from academic books and journals, aside from a few scattered articles. It even dropped out of general surveys of Victorian literature (a phenomenon that has continued until quite recently). When Victorian Poetry began to subdivide its annual round-up of “The Year’s

Work in Victorian Poetry” by individual author, in 1974, it included a heading for

“FitzGerald and Other Minor Mid-Victorian Poets.” But in the three years that the 8 heading existed as an annual feature, only one brief piece on FitzGerald was mentioned; after that the section dropped out of “The Year’s Work” for lack of material.xv By the end of the 1970s, critical interest in FitzGerald had reached its lowest point since the discovery of the Rubáiyát.

In the meantime, the other, more concentrated negative reaction had also occurred. In 1967 Robert Graves, the eminent British poet, novelist, and critic, collaborated with Omar Ali-Shah to publish a new translation, The Rubaiyyat of Omar

Khayaam. The book appeared in America the following year and was republished as a

Penguin paperback in 1972. Graves, who did not claim to know any Persian, based his verse rendering on Ali-Shah’s literal translation of what the two authors claimed was the

“earliest and most authentic” manuscript of the Rubáiyát in existence.xvi The new translation immediately aroused suspicion on scholarly grounds (not least because the supposed manuscript was never produced). But Graves added further provocation by taking this occasion to offer comments about FitzGerald and his version of the Rubáiyát.

In a lengthy preface, riddled with factual errors, entitled “The Fitz-Omar Cult,” Graves attacks FitzGerald’s character and ridicules his Rubáiyát both as a translation and as a piece of English poetry. Unsurprisingly, there followed a flurry of responses, reviews, letters to the editor, and interviews, during which Graves continued not only to defend the authenticity of his source but also clamorously to condemn FitzGerald himself as ignorant (and morally dubious) and his poetry as incompetent.

The debate was often rancorous, but when it was over, the result was as gratifyingly conclusive as it was, in retrospect, predictable. Two scholars came more or less independently to the same conclusion: the Persian text on which Graves’s translation 9 was based could be found, not in an ancient manuscript, but in Edward Heron-Allen’s

1899 edition of FitzGerald’s poem, in which Heron-Allen had printed opposite each of

FitzGerald’s quatrains the Persian original from which it most likely derived.xvii In other words, if the text that Graves versified sounded to him like authentic Omar, that is because not only the selection of the quatrains but their order (concerning which Graves is very insistent) was determined by FitzGerald. In his preface, Graves fulminates against FitzGerald’s “mispresentation” of the true Omar Khayyám, and he quotes with derisive incredulity Saintsbury’s claim that “to us … Fitzgerald is Omar Khayaam and one may almost dare to say Omar Khayaam is Fitzgerald.”xviii Yet in the case of certain quatrains, where Heron-Allen could find no clear source and therefore had to cobble together a Persian “original” out of scattered lines, Graves’s Rubaiyyat of Omar

Khayaam is merely an English translation of a Persian translation of FitzGerald’s original stanza.

The whole bizarre episode no doubt reveals more about Robert Graves than about

Edward FitzGerald.xix Nevertheless, Graves’s edition, and especially his critical preface, can be very instructive, in two ways. In the first place, Graves’s attack on FitzGerald, which concentrates largely on his perceived inaccuracy as a translator and on his shortcomings as a writer of original verse, reflects, though in exaggerated form, a discomfort that critics of the poem have long felt. The uncertain status of FitzGerald’s

Rubáiyát, somewhere between a translation and an original work, may account as much as anything else for T. S. Eliot’s refusal to admit it into his canon: how can a poem participate in the great tradition of literature if it is not attributable to an “individual talent”?xx The Rubáiyát is not of course unique in this respect: there are other major 10 works of English poetry that are avowed translations or adaptations, from Chaucer’s

Troilus and Criseyde to Samuel Johnson’s “The Vanity of Human Wishes.” But in the case of the Rubáiyát, the uneasiness that readers may feel when faced with any literary collaboration is greatly increased by the fact that one side of the collaboration is opaque.xxi The average English reader (including Graves) has no knowledge of Persian literature and must depend upon others, not just to translate Omar’s original quatrains, but even to locate them, or determine whether they exist at all. The Rubáiyát therefore carries with it not only the slight suspicion that accompanies any collaborative work, but the much greater threat of being a hoax – and this may explain the shrill indignation of

Graves’s tone. Nothing is more infuriating than the sense of having been duped, and

Graves’s tirade against the “Fitz-Omar cult” derives its venom from his sense that the reading public has for over a century been victim to an elaborate ruse. Ironically, of course, the same sense of resentment fueled the reaction against Graves. Had he merely published an essay criticizing FitzGerald and his poem, Graves might have sparked debate but would scarcely have caused a literary melee. Because his criticisms were attached, however, to a translation that proclaimed itself uniquely authoritative but turned out to be spurious, reaction to his book was particularly acrimonious.

Graves’s preface is intriguing in the first place, therefore, because it displays an extreme form of the anxiety that many critics feel when faced with FitzGerald’s

“translation.” The preface is further valuable in that Graves’s specific criticisms of

FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát help draw attention to some of the poem’s most original features.

In this sense Graves could be compared to Richard Bentley, whose 1732 edition of

Paradise Lost famously, and shamelessly, “corrected” the poem’s supposed errors, and in 11 doing so highlighted its most extraordinary lines and locutions. The difference is that

Bentley attributed almost all the errors of Paradise Lost to a fictive “Editor,” whom he accused of having corrupted Milton’s text and for whom he reserved his abuse. For

Graves, by contrast, who believed himself to have access to Omar’s original text,

FitzGerald was the incompetent and misleading intermediary who stood between the reader and the uncorrupted poem. Nevertheless, Graves’s objections are often illuminating, not least in underscoring, once again, how FitzGerald’s poem tends to collapse temporal distinctions. For example, Graves disapproves of the lines “I sometimes think that never blows so red / The Rose as where some buried Cæsar bled,” because of the time-warp they present: “Nor do buried Caesars bleed: the Emperor Julian, mortally wounded by a Persian arrow in A.D. 363, was interred by his officers only when dead” (Graves, p. 12). Yet the very specificity of his historical illustration shows how far

Graves is from the spirit of the poem, with its “sometimes” and “some buried Caesar.”

The Rubáiyát is as indifferent to history as it is to sequence and causality. The bleeding

Caesar is described as buried (or the buried Caesar as bleeding) not mistakenly, but proleptically; when seen from the vantage of today – the only viewpoint the poem recognizes – the wounding, death, and burial are all foreshortened and hence compacted.xxii

Graves lodges similar objections to the following stanza:

The Ball no Question makes of Ayes and Noes,

But Right or Left as strikes the Player goes;

And He that toss’d Thee down into the Field,

He knows about it all – HE knows – HE knows! 12

(1st edn., st. 50)

Graves calls the second line “clumsy”: “it might well mean ‘as a bright idea strikes the player’, rather than ‘as the player strikes the ball.’ And not only could ‘Ayes and Noes’ – a jocular Parliamentary metaphor irrelevant to the polo-field – be mistaken in recitation for ‘Eyes and Nose’ but it rhymes illegitimately (except as a Chaucerian ‘French rhyme’) with ‘He knows’” (Graves, p. 13). Graves’s observations are acute and might all be valid if the quatrain were taken out of context. But in this case, the irrelevance of parliamentary language is precisely FitzGerald’s point: his deity is not a deliberate judge weighing both sides of a “Question,” but a “Player” whose actions are arbitrary. The subtle presence of “eyes and nose” on the ball (a presence sensible only to the ear) might be infelicitous if it did not continue a chain of imagery that runs throughout the poem and its landscape: the Moving Finger of the very next stanza; the river’s lip; the garden’s lap; the tongue of the pot; the rose that is red with Caesar’s blood. The exact rhyme of

“knows” with “Noes” slyly conflates the two: FitzGerald’s deity is not only omniscient but all-forbidding. Above all, the pithy combination of two separate meanings in “as strikes the Player” is telling. This deity exists outside of time, not in the sense of being immutable throughout eternity, but in the sense that his reactions are instantaneous: no sooner has a thought struck him than he has already struck us in his turn. Graves concludes that “Too many of Fitzgerald’s stanzas lack the controlled tenseness required for a religious poem” (p. 13); but FitzGerald’s poem is irreligious, and it is by Graves’s own account full of tension and unexpected complexity.

FitzGerald’s reputation probably benefited, if anything, from the controversy caused by Graves’s book; yet the renewal of scholarly interest did not begin for another 13 decade or more. Then in 1980 there appeared The Letters of Edward FitzGerald in four volumes, edited by Alfred McKinley Terhune and Annabelle Burdick Terhune – a complete, fully annotated edition of the letters and an invaluable resource. It was followed in 1985 by Robert Bernard Martin’s With Friends Possessed, the first full- length biography of FitzGerald in forty years, and in 1997 by Christopher Decker’s critical edition of the Rubáiyát, which has now become the standard text of the poem.xxiii

Interpretative criticism, meanwhile, began to reappear as well. The first article about the

Rubáiyát to appear in Victorian Poetry was Daniel Schenker’s “Fugitive Articulation”

(significantly subtitled “An Introduction to The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám”) in 1981.

Schenker can claim the honor of having been the first critic to comment on how the

Rubáiyát had been scanted by recent criticism – a refrain that was to continue for at least the next two decades.xxiv But such comments would now be out of date: critical interest has been steadily reviving, and since 2002 no fewer than three books on Victorian poetry

(by Douglas-Fairhurst, Gray, and Riede) have not only included but actually concluded with chapters devoted to FitzGerald.

The current special issue continues this trend, with five new articles about

FitzGerald and his poem. In the first, Anna Jane Barton re-examines the relationship of

FitzGerald and Alfred Tennyson, distinguishing between the former’s preference for an old-fashioned, private, amateur literary practice, dependent upon letters and manuscripts, and the latter’s commitment to a more modern, public, professional print culture. She concludes with a reading of Tennyson’s verse epistle “To E. FitzGerald,” a poem that mediates between the two positions. Annmarie Drury discusses FitzGerald’s methods of translation and argues that his treatment of Omar is not Orientalist, in the sense of 14 imperialistic or appropriative. Rather, his un-literal version of the Rubáiyát, like all of his translations whether from Eastern languages or Western, embraces accident and imperfection in a manner consistent with the central message of his poem. Giuseppe

Albano considers the role of drink in the Rubáiyát, arguing that the apparently simplistic evasions that characterize the poem’s vinous musings establish the Rubáiyát as a pastoral poem. Pastoral (like Epicureanism, which FitzGerald also deliberately invokes) achieves profundity through simplicity; the Rubáiyát’s studious avoidance of both philosophical engagement and worldly care thus places it within an important and complex literary tradition. Herbert Tucker’s article argues that FitzGerald’s poem, though not aiming to be a literal translation, is nonetheless decidedly literalist, in the sense of resisting mystical or allegorical interpretation. This literalism is reinforced by the poem’s tropes: its favoring of metonymy over metaphor; its retention of untranslated, unassimilated elements of Persian in the English text; and its self-referentiality, which constantly draws attention to the poem’s own structures and physical appearance on the page. Daniel

Karlin’s essay considers the editorial problems posed by the Rubáiyát’s multiple versions. Finally, an Appendix reprints the two earliest reviews of the Rubáiyát, neither of which has heretofore been easily available: the anonymous 1859 review in the Literary

Gazette, and Charles Eliot Norton’s 1869 review of the second edition, which helped launch the vogue of the Rubáiyát in America.

It is only fitting that this issue should contain both the oldest and the newest criticism of the Rubáiyát, since the poem’s ability to perplex our sense of time, of beginning and end, remains one of its most entrancing features.xxv The Rubáiyát begins with the apparent arrival of “Morning” in the first stanza, only for it to be revealed as 15

“False morning” in the second.xxvi Similarly, the first sentence of FitzGerald’s introductory essay locates Omar’s lifetime rather precisely between “the latter half of our

Eleventh, and … the First Quarter of our Twelfth, Century,” but the last sentence tells how Omar eventually just “fell back upon TODAY (which has out-lasted so many

Tomorrows!)” (Rubáiyát, pp. 3, 9). The whole work hovers between ancient and modern.

Its setting is medieval Persia, but its language is frequently that of the King James Bible, a work simultaneously older and more recent than Omar.xxvii The stanza form is new to

English verse – and yet not entirely new. Although the AABA pattern had never before been used for discrete quatrains, it appears at the very heart of the Spenserian stanza.

Spenser’s Faerie Queene, like the Rubáiyát, is set in an unplaceable time – a distant mythical past that nevertheless allegorically shadows forth contemporary Britain.

Spenser’s language, meanwhile, sounds antique even though many of the words are newly coined. It is therefore appropriate, and fortunate for FitzGerald, that Spenser’s stanza should contain suspended within it a form of the Persian quatrain; when the

Rubáiyát was published, the stanza, for all its novelty, already had a ring of familiarity for readers of English poetry.

Consider for instance these lines, taken from the middle of one of the Spenserian stanzas of Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage; Byron speaks of

[D]aily abstinence and nightly prayer;

But ere his sackcloth garb Repentance wear,

Some days of joyaunce are decreed to all,

To take of pleasaunce each his secret share.xxviii 16

The lines, with their brief day of pleasure and their archaic language, could almost form a stanza of the Rubáiyát. FitzGerald may even have had them in mind when he wrote,

Indeed, indeed, Repentance oft before

I swore—but was I sober when I swore?

And then and then came Spring, and Rose-in-hand

My thread-bare Penitence apieces tore.

(1st edn., st. 70)xxix

The echo of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage is apt, since Byron’s poem, like Spenser’s, exists outside of time. Childe Harold is a “youth” who nevertheless feels himself to be prematurely aged. He is both contemporary, since he witnesses current events, and antique, called by an anachronistic title.

In the same way the Rubáiyát, for all the vicissitudes of its history, seems to defy time. It ends with nightfall; but the close of its day, like the dawn at its beginning, is ambiguous.

Yon rising Moon that looks for us again—

How oft hereafter will she wax and wane;

How oft hereafter rising look for us

Through this same Garden—and for one in vain!

And when like her, oh Sákí, you shall pass

Among the Guests Star-scatter’d on the Grass,

And in your joyous errand reach the spot

Where I made One—turn down an empty Glass! 17

(4th edn., sts. 100-101)

These stanzas concern death, absence, and emptiness, and so they ought to feel conclusive. But they begin with an image, not of setting, but of (repeated) “rising”; and the images that follow are the same ones that have reappeared again and again throughout the poem – the garden, the guests, the wine-bearer, and above all the empty glass. The result of the repetition is a sense, not of emptiness, but of repletion, and of a continuity so perfect that it is difficult to accept this ending as the final word. Even as it quietly concludes, the Rubáiyát promises to return hereafter.

i The British Museum received its copy of the first edition on March 30, 1859; the book may have been on sale earlier, but advertisements did not appear until the following month. See The Letters of Edward FitzGerald, ed. Alfred McKinley Terhune and

Annabelle Burdick Terhune, 4 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 2:331; hereafter cited as Letters. ii On FitzGerald’s friendship with Browne, see Martin, With Friends Possessed, pp. 110-

118 and 211-217. Two years before Browne’s death, FitzGerald referred to him as the

“Friend I love best in the world – who scarce ever reads a Book, but knows better than I do what they are made of from a hint” (Letters 2:276). iii Sometimes the connection was less conscious. FitzGerald’s description of Browne’s accident in the letter to Tennyson (“his Horse … reared, and her hind Legs slipping under her, she fell over and on him”) seems very nearly to echo the final sentence of his 1859 introduction, describing Omar as one who “fell back upon TODAY … as the only Ground 18

he had got to stand upon, however momentarily slipping from under his Feet.” See

Edward FitzGerald, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám: A Critical Edition, ed. Christopher

Decker (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1997), p. 9; all quotations from the poem and its introduction refer to this edition. iv As FitzGerald waited to be summoned to the bedside, he took down from the bookshelf the copy of his own Euphranor: A Dialogue on Youth that he had given to Browne and added the inscription: “This little book would never have been written, had I not known my dear friend William Browne, who, unconsciously, supplied the moral” (Letters

2:330n.). But Browne’s early death reversed their positions: a fortnight later FitzGerald referred to him as “My poor Master” (2:333). v Yet even now the Rubáiyát retains some of its old cultural currency. As recently as

1998, while he was facing impeachment, Bill Clinton quoted the poem’s most famous quatrain in a public statement: “An old and dear friend of mine recently sent me the wisdom of a poet, who wrote, ‘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” (“Testing of a President: President’s Comments on the Impeachment

Proceedings,” New York Times, December 12, 1998, A11, col. 1). Clinton’s reference to an unspecified “poet” has a venerable tradition behind it. Those who quote the Rubáiyát have often been unable or unwilling to determine whether to attribute it to Omar or to

FitzGerald; and since the poem seems long since to have entered the domain of public wisdom, no strict attribution is felt to be necessary. vi Alfred McKinley Terhune was apparently the first to refer to the story of the poem’s discovery, and its subsequent dissemination among the Pre-Raphaelite poets, as the 19

“Romance of the Rubáiyát.” See The Life of Edward FitzGerald (New Haven: Yale

University Press, 1947), pp. 204-214; Terhune’s biography, although it has to a large extent been superseded by Martin’s, remains very valuable. The “Romance” has accrued many apocryphal details over the years; Martin observes that the story has been told so many times, and so much faith invested in various aspects of the legend, that “recounting the discovery of the poem gives one the sense of going on tiptoe through a minefield”

(Martin 218n.). vii Not only is the tripartite rise-and-fall pattern that of classical tragedy and of the Wheel of Fortune, but it also seems to echo the structure of the poem itself, as outlined by

FitzGerald in his description of the speaker: “He begins with Dawn pretty sober and contemplative: then as he thinks and drinks grows savage, blasphemous, etc., and then again sobers down into melancholy at nightfall” (Letters 3:339). viii Frank Kermode, Continuities (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968), p. 57. ix See for instance John D. Yohannan, “The Fin de Siècle Cult of FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám,” Review of National Literatures 2 (1971): 74-91; reprinted in Harold

Bloom, ed., Edward FitzGerald’s The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám: Modern Critical

Interpretations (Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2004), pp. 5-19. x Paul Elmer More, “Kipling and FitzGerald,” in Shelburne Essays: Second Series (New

York: Putnam, 1907), p. 104. xi George Saintsbury, “FitzGerald’s ‘Omar Khayyám’,” in The Memorial Volume: A New

Collection of his Essays and Papers, 2nd edn. (London: Methuen, 1946), pp. 78-79. xii D’Ambrosio discusses Eliot’s first encounter with the Rubáiyát in Eliot Possessed, pp.

17-24. D’Ambrosio’s second chapter (pp. 47-57) discusses the poem’s shifting reception 20

by American critics, including More, in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; she also gives a very useful account of reaction against the poem by Christian moralists and temperance advocates (pp. 58-72). xiii Arberry, The Romance of the Rubáiyát, p. 7. Arberry himself did not hesitate to speak with enthusiasm: he calls the Rubáiyát “the finest and most famous translation ever made,” and he pays “a scholar’s tribute to the man whose unique genius has given the world infinite delight, and whose services to literature in general, and to Persian studies in particular, by the merit of this immortal poem exceed all measure and excel all praise”

(pp. 14, 39). xiv Arberry, p. 7. xv The heading reappeared again a few times in the 1980s, in response to the publication of the Terhune edition of the letters and of Martin’s biography (see below). xvi Robert Graves and Omar Ali-Shah, The Rubaiyyat of Omar Khayaam: A New

Translation with Critical Commentaries (London: Cassell, 1967), p. 1; hereafter cited as

“Graves.” xvii Edward Heron-Allen, Edward FitzGerald’s Rubâ’iyât of Omar Khayyâm, with their

Original Persian Sources: Collated from his own MSS., and Literally Translated

(London: Bernard Quaritch, 1899). For the two most complete and scholarly responses to the Graves and Ali-Shah edition, see L. P. Elwell-Sutton, “The Rubaiyat Revisited,”

Delos 3 (1969), pp. 170-91, and John Charles Edward Bowen, Translation or Travesty?:

An Enquiry into Robert Graves’s Version of Some Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

(Abingdon, Berkshire: The Abbey Press, 1973). 21

xviii Graves, pp. 29, 11. FitzGerald’s name is spelled correctly by Saintsbury, but Graves alters it; he seems deliberately to have misspelled FitzGerald’s name throughout his preface. xix Graves’s biographers agree that he fully believed in the authenticity of the alleged manuscript; even when it was shown that the order of its quatrains was invented by

FitzGerald, Graves claimed that FitzGerald must have had access to the “real” manuscript and never admitted it. One biographer points out that at this time in his life, Graves was becoming increasingly susceptible to paranoid belief in plots and conspiracies; see

Miranda Seymour, Robert Graves: Life on the Edge (New York; Henry Holt, 1995), pp.

443-44. This does not explain, however, why Graves appears deliberately to have misrepresented FitzGerald’s life in his preface, nor what he thought that he was contributing to the tradition of humane letters by referring to FitzGerald as a “dilettante faggot” (The Daily Telegraph, March 25, 1968; quoted in Bowen, Translation or

Travesty?, p. 15). xx Eliot first publicly distanced himself from the Rubáiyát in a review he published in

1919, a few months before “Tradition and the Individual Talent”; both the review and the essay comment upon the influence that a single work can have on a young writer

(D’Ambrosio, pp. 153-55). The Rubáiyát certainly meets the criteria Eliot sets in his essay for being “traditional” – namely, possessing “a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together”; the question is whether the poem achieves the status of “the new (the really new) work of art.” See T. S. Eliot,

“Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in Selected Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace,

1950), pp. 4-5. 22

xxi On the anxieties attendant upon joint authorship, see for instance Jack Stillinger,

Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius (Oxford and New York: Oxford

University Press, 1991), and André Lefevere, Translation, Rewriting, and the

Manipulation of Literary Fame (London and New York: Routledge, 1992); and on

FitzGerald’s collaboration in particular, Erik Gray, “‘Let the Credit Go’: Coleridge,

Edward FitzGerald, and Literary Custody,” The Coleridge Bulletin 14 (1999), pp. 47-52. xxii See Gray, The Poetry of Indifference, pp. 120-21. xxiii For the Terhune and Decker editions, see notes 1 and 3 respectively; for Martin, see bibliography, below. xxiv Schenker writes in his opening paragraph, “Today, the Rubáiyát receives little attention from critics, although the poem is frequently reprinted …. Probably few poems are so widely circulated (whether read I do not know) and yet so rarely talked about”

(Schenker, p. 49). xxv On this topic see Douglas-Fairhurst, Victorian Afterlives, pp. 278-300. xxvi 1st edn., st. 1; 2nd edn., st. 2. In the first edition too the second stanza refers to false morning but calls it “Dawn’s Left Hand,” which is glossed in FitzGerald’s note as “The

‘False Dawn’.” xxvii FitzGerald believed that Persian should be translated “something as the Bible is translated, preserving the Oriental Idiom,” and regarding his own translations he said, “I always refer back to the Bible” (Letters 2:119, 164). The Rubáiyát has often been compared to the Song of Songs, and even more commonly to Ecclesiastes; see for instance Schenker, p. 61, and David Sonstroem, “Abandon the Day: FitzGerald’s

Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám,” Victorian Newsletter 36 (1969), p. 12. FitzGerald alludes 23

to Ecclesiastes in all four versions of his introduction to the poem, as does Norton in his

1869 review (see Appendix, below). xxviii Canto 2, lines 741-44; in Lord Byron, The Major Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann

(New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 77. xxix The poem also mentions a “Garment of Repentance” (1st edn., st. 7). On the

Rubáiyát’s many echoes of English poetry, including Byron’s, see Decker, “Other Men’s

Flowers,” especially pp. 237-38.