The Cup that Clears…

XX.

“Ah! my beloved, fill the cup that clears

To-day of past regrets and future fears-

To-morrow? – why, to-morrow I may be

Myself with yesterday’s sev’n thousand years.”

With this verse, FitzGerald makes explicit his carpe diem theme. In a sense, this verse is a summation of several others that have gone before. In re-arranging Khayyam’s epigrammatic ru’bai, FitzGerald creates a definite framework for the sentiments. Thus we have some image-heavy verses one after the other and then we hit a fixed point – like this one – which makes explicit what the foregoing verses were driving at. There’s a lot packed into this particular quatrain, so let’s take it apart.

First, we have the Beloved. In the first translation, this figure is quite nebulous, but it firms up in the later versions. In one sense, the Beloved is simply an audience for the voice of the writer to address; in another, it becomes more personal and spiritual. Sufi belief identifies the ‘Beloved’ with God, the one who – out of love – created humanity and the world and for whom love in return is the highest form of worship. Sufism strives towards an ecstasy of love for the Divine into which one loses oneself as a form of mystical reuniting. As with many elements of FitzGerald’s translation, there are multiple readings at work here.

The later translations identify the Beloved explicitly as “Saki” – the cup bearer – kind of an Arabian Nights wine-waiter. The Saki ensures that the drinker’s cup is full and that the wine keeps flowing. Years of pop songs have taught us to recognise that ‘filling one’s cup’ is a metaphor for making one feel fulfilled and content; often the cup-filler is the one who is loved, or who is otherwise an object of affection. The Sufi mystics, notably the Whirling Dervishes, recognised the trance-like states that they entered through their dancing as being filled up with the ecstatic essence of God. We have a long poetic debt to Omar Khayyam and FitzGerald here.

It’s noteworthy here to point out that the Saki is never identified as either male or female. Some, like Robert Graves for instance, have chosen to use this as ‘evidence’ for the fact that FitzGerald was homosexual (something that has never been definitively determined). Given that, as we’ve seen, the Saki, the Beloved, might well be an image of God, the importance of gender for this figure is rendered completely beside the point. On the other hand – more prosaically – by rendering the Saki sexless, it allows the reader – regardless of their own persuasion – to bond seamlessly with the “I” of the authorial voice. In short, it allows everyone to read the work equally. The fact that most artists depicting the Rubaiyat choose to show the Saki as female, is another issue altogether…

The verse addresses the Beloved, telling them to fill their cup in order to remove regret caused by past actions and also the fearful anticipation of the unforeseen events to come. “The Cup that Clears” is a symbol of making peace with the past and releasing hesitation about the future; it’s a Persian-Medieval-by-way-of-the-Victorian-Era injunction to practise mindfulness; to live in the present. It’s quite possible that Charles Dumont and Michel Vaucaire were channelling just such sentiments when penning “Non, Je ne Regrette Rien” for Edith Piaf in 1960.

Now that we’ve cleared ourselves of regret for our past actions, that leaves What Comes Next. Here again the authors are explicit – nothing may change. Nothing untoward might take place. There is no point in worrying about what might happen, or what might not. Tomorrow, they say, you might simply be the same as you are today, with the same seven-thousand years of history behind you as before. (Both Khayyam and FitzGerald were raised with notions of the Earth only having been around for a few thousand years.) Amazingly, everything might stay exactly the same, as much as anything might change. There’s no point in fretting.

At this stage in the poem we’ve almost reached a point where the thesis changes over to a new tack. For those interested, there are six more “Seize the Day” verses to go before another subject enters the field; however, we should take the time to savour each of these as they pass and try not to worry about where we’re headed next.