These poems, however, raise another question, that of Omar’s relation to Sufism, the mystical tendency within Islam. FitzGerald understood Sufism to be a form of Pantheism, and images of earthly desire in Sufi poetry to be allegorical, representing the soul’s yearning for reabsorption into the divine unity. In such an allegorical scheme, drunkenness represents spiritual ecstasy, sexual desire the longing for union with the divine, etc. FitzGerald’s rebuttal of this way of reading Omar, in his Preface and elsewhere, speaks for itself; modern scholarship might not challenge his conclusion, but would seek to shift the terms of the debate. The equation between Oriental Sufism and western Pantheism is not as straightforward as FitzGerald implies, and the categorical distinction he draws between symbolic and literal meaning may not do justice to the subtlety of the poems. FitzGerald himself recognized that, in the end, the matter was one of interpretation.
The main historical feature of Omar’s activity as a poet which is missing from FitzGerald’s account is to do with the form of the ruba´i itself. A whole dimension of meaning rests in this choice of form, as it does in European literature with a poet’s choice of the sonnet or ode. All that FitzGerald tells us about the ruba´i is that it is a short whole poem, a quatrain with a fixed metrical scheme. (FitzGerald’s major innovation in the poem, which I discuss later in this introduction, was to manufacture a poem from a sequence of such quatrains — akin to telling a story in limericks.) He says nothing about the cultural significance of the form, which, Peter Avery remarks, offered Persian poets of Omar’s time an alternative to the ‘lengthy and highly artificial panegyrics and narrative poems in a single rhyme’ which were the staple of official literary culture.
But Avery goes on to emphasize that this in itself cannot account for the popularity of the ruba´i. It became a form identified with dissent from social and religious orthodoxy; it could circulate anonymously, was easily memorized, and ‘could be recited in coteries of like-minded people, both for entertainment and to afford relief from oppression’. Although FitzGerald does not give his readers this context, it supports his interpretation of the form as used by Omar; it is one among many examples of how far his sympathy with Omar carried him, past the point at which better-informed scholars and translators have become bogged down in what they know.
When FitzGerald encountered Omar’s poetry, in the summer of 1856, he did so in the form of a copy of a fifteenth-century manuscript which, though it undoubtedly contained dozens of poems not by Omar, only contained a few which could not possibly be his. It was, to use a term found in modern scholarship, an ‘Omarian’ text, as we speak of a ‘Homeric’ corpus. In this manuscript FitzGerald discerned, and was touched and possessed by, a spirit of uncompromising materialism, as profound and clear-sighted as that of Lucretius, shot through with lyrical power and sardonic wit. It was that spirit he set out to capture in his English version. In the Persian text the rubáiyát are independent, epigrammatic poems, grouped according to tradition by end-rhyme — in other words, not forming a narrative or argumentative sequence. FitzGerald saw how some of these separate poems might be combined in such a sequence, by analogy with the classical Greek or Latin ‘eclogue’.
The poem begins at dawn and ends at nightfall, and in the course of this symbolic day the speaker meditates on ‘Human Death and Fate’, mourns the transience of life, confronts his mortality with courage, with indignation, with gaiety, but without what he regards as the illusions and consolations of religious faith. Only the present moment has value; past and future are equally unreal; it is one of the poem’s many fruitful paradoxes that this proposition can only be understood from a perspective which, like that of the speaker, takes in the whole cycle of time. A second such paradox expresses delight in drunkenness, and in sexual freedom, in terms that bring the pleasure of sensation close to that of oblivion, of self-unmaking. The companionship of fellowdrinkers is invoked at the beginning and end of the poem, and the speaker intermittently addresses a ‘Beloved’ who may be male or female, but human relationships are not the subject of the poem and do not in themselves compensate for a deity who may be absent, or indifferent, or unjust.
Khayyam's Poetry, Iranian Culture and World Intellectual Heritage
