Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

McCarthy's charming prose version I have to express my chief obligation.

Those who know it will be able to discover for themselves to what extent I have literally followed, to what extent departed from, and to what extent expanded his prose. I confess to having made the freest use of my own fancy, and a number of the following quatrains have little or no verbal parallel in the original. The quatrains in celebration of the clay provide a case in point. Omar never tires of pondering the riddle of the dust Omar gives several hints for that quaint little miracle-play, but the development of them is so much FitzGerald's own that there was no option but to leave the pots alone.

The reader may remark that Omar's pessimism in the following paraphrase is mitigated more frequently by moods of optimism than in FitzGerald.

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In this my paraphrase accords more nearly with the Omar of the more literal translators--for Omar is always ready to curse God with one cup and love Him with the next. That Omar sometimes made use of wine and women as symbols of his mystical philosophy is, doubtless, true; but that he more often made a simpler use of them is, happily, still more certain--for Omar was, emphatically, a poet who found his ideal in the real. As it proved impracticable to give even such random continuity to these love-verses, as I have attempted in the body of the poem, I have made use of them as an intermezzo, a device of arrangement which is appropriate as suggesting the intercalary importance of women in the life of the great thinker-drinker--as though, in some pause of his grave or humourous argument, he should turn to caress the little moon at his side.

The writer has taken the opportunity of this new edition to make one or two revisions, and to add fifty quatrains. Would that some voice that knew the whole deceit, Far off in space the unborn soul might greet,.

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His latest book is Carpe Diem Regained: The Vanishing Art of Seizing the Day Brought to you by curio. Edited by Nigel Warburton. How did a line poem based on the writings of a Persian sage and advocating seize-the-day hedonism achieve widespread popularity in Victorian England? When, in , it fell into the hands of John Ruskin, he declared: Omar dining clubs sprang up, and you could even buy Omar tooth powder and illustrated playing cards.

During the war, dead soldiers were found in the trenches with battered copies tucked away in their pockets.

The answer sings out from some of its most famous verses:. It was a passionate outcry against the unofficial Victorian ideologies of moderation, primness and self-control.

This heady union of bodily pleasures, religious doubt and impending mortality captured the imagination of its Victorian audience, who had been raised singing pious hymns at church on a Sunday morning. He took up its themes in his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray For Wilde, as for FitzGerald, carpe diem hedonism was far more than the pursuit of sensory pleasures: On the one hand, it could serve as an antidote to a growing puritanical streak in modern happiness thinking, which threatens to turn us into self-controlled moderation addicts who rarely express a passionate lust for life.

Pick up a book from the self-help shelves and it is unlikely to advise dealing with your problems by smoking a joint under the stars or downing a few tequila slammers in an all-night club. Yet such hedonistic pursuits — enjoyed sensibly — have been central to human culture and wellbeing for centuries: