It is said that its effect on Victorian England was no less considerable than that of Darwin's On the Origin of Species, published in the same year, 1859.Įveryone will have their favourite stanzas. Though initially published as an anonymous pamphlet, once the Rubáiyát was discovered by Rossetti, Swinburne and others, it swiftly became famous. A whole culture must have suddenly seemed within the imaginative reach of the poem's first audience. The speaker that emerges with such authority and panache, despite the stiffish western dress of iambic pentameter, has a voice unlike any other in Victorian poetry, and a philosophical sensibility which, while it has been compared to that of Epicurus and Lucretius, is new and distinct. Khayyám, an agnostic famed during his lifetime as a mathematician and astronomer rather than a poet, and his mediator, a nineteenth-century English sceptic who believed that 'science unrolls a greater epic than the Iliad', may not meet in a true linguistic union, but there seems to be a 'marriage of true minds' nevertheless (and, yes, you'll note a passing trace of Shakespeare in FitzGerald's diction). His endeavour might more generously be termed 'transcreation'. The 101-verse semi-narrative FitzGerald finally assembled is the product of a ruthless editorial job – but how much poorer English poetry would be without it. Furthermore, Khayyám's 750-plus quatrains certainly did not constitute one long poem.

FitzGerald got the rhyme-scheme right but missed the rhythmic subtlety of the original prosodic pattern some of the quatrains are paraphrased, some mashed together, others invented. 'Succinctness, spontaneity and wit' are its essence, the encyclopaedist writes, coolly noting FitzGerald's 'venial infidelity to his Persian model'.

The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics quotes the tradition that the Persian quatrain-form, the ruba'i, originated in the gleeful shouts of a child, overheard and imitated by a passing poet.

From the rubaiyat by omar khayyam