#41: The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

A wet February

 Fill the cup

Come, fill the Cup, and in the Fire of Spring

The Winter Garment of Repentance fling:

Omar Khayyam's celebration of wine, nature, birds, love and the passing moment is called for after dry January, and I usually read it after having a dry month. This year I learnt the first seven stanzas by heart, which also mention January, or thereabouts:

Now the New Year reviving old Desires,

The thoughtful Soul to Solitude retires,

    Where the White Hand of Moses on the Bough

Puts out, and Jesus from the Ground suspires.

I wonder what these last two lines mean – those long-gone mortal heroes now reabsorbed into earth? It could also be the thoughtful soul bringing those people alive through their imaginations; 'Jesus from the Ground suspires' perhaps being the effect of concentrated meditation. Maybe it's gently satirising those who believe in immortality.

Iram and Jamshyd
The next stanza continues:

Iram indeed is gone with all its Rose,

And Jamshyd's Sev'n-ring'd Cup where no one knows;

    But still the Vine her ancient Ruby yields,

And still a Garden by the Water blows.

Jamshyd was an Iranian mythical figure whose cup was filled with elixir of immortality and was used in scrying (using a substance, here a liquid, to make out messages from the beyond). Iram is a Persian city which might or might not have existed. However, the 'ancient Ruby' certainly does.

And then the rest of the seventh stanza brings us up to the present:

Come, fill the Cup, and in the Fire of Spring

The Winter Garment of Repentance fling:

    The Bird of Time has but a little way

To fly --- and Lo! the Bird is on the Wing.

Frost at Midnight

In this last line it is as if the poet has suddenly seen or thought of something, made a link in his mind even as he is writing. And this calls us out of the poem, at least temporarily. This reminds me of the first lines of Coleridge's Frost at Midnight:

The Frost performs its secret ministry,
Unhelped by any wind. The owlet's cry
Came loud—and hark, again! loud as before.

There is also a moment of fellowship with the reader – look! Listen! But not just to the poem – also to what is outside it.

Photo by Vincent van Zalinge on Unsplash