The Thoughtful Soul...

IV.

“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.”*

 

At this point in the poem, things start to get a little bit technical, with references to things that most Western, Christian, readers don’t understand. There are more of these later which are even more obscure, but this is the first one that has a ring of familiarity about it and which many westerners get frustrated by because the information seems like it should be discernible, but somehow it’s just out of reach.

The reference to Moses here is a bit obscure. To get to the heart of it, the reader needs to know their Bible, particularly this bit from the Old Testament:

Exodus IV:6 – “And the Lord said furthermore unto him, Put now thine hand into thy bosom. And he put his hand into his bosom: and when he took it out, behold, his hand was leprous as snow.”

That is, his hand is turned chalky and white, as the flesh of lepers is often described. In the following section, God tells Moses to repeat the manoeuvre and this time his hand is restored to health. Moses is instructed to do this in order to demonstrate the power of the Lord (along with turning sticks into snakes and water into blood) to all and sundry. In particular, with this gambit, the implication is that God can take what is unhealthy and unproductive and turn it into something wholesome. So here, Omar (and FitzGerald) are likening the turning from Winter to Spring, to this magical restorative power of God.

In later stanzas, the references are less cross-cultural, confined to Islamic history and literature, but we’ll cross those bridges as we reach them.

There are other technical aspects of Omar’s work that we need to address before we continue and now seems a good enough time as any to sort them out. These are specifically, the limiting factors which made the writing of these verses so interesting to Omar and also to FitzGerald. First we need to pin down what the word “Rubaiyat” means:

 

The word derives ultimately from the Arabic word for the number “four” – “ruba”. You’ll have noticed that each verse consists of four lines; in Arabic the word for a four-line poem – what in English we would refer to as a “quatrain” – is “ruba’iyah”. Therefore, a collection of four-line verses is known in Arabic as a “rubaiyat”. Hence, “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam” or, to put it another way, ‘A Collection of Four-line Islamic Verses Written by the Poet, Omar Khayyam’.

As a further wrinkle, the rubaiyat follow a particular meter and rhyme scheme. Each line consists of a tetrametrical or pentametrical fomat; that is, there are four or five syllabic stresses in each line. This is pretty technical stuff and can get fairly abstruse, so I don’t want to get into it too much; suffice it to say though, that the words in each line of the poem follow a rhythmic flow; for Omar, this may well have been far more strictly adhered to than FitzGerald has done with his translation. In this sense, reading the verses in the original, they may well have sounded a bit stilted and forced – I would like to think otherwise, though.

Finally, there is a rhyme scheme at work, following an AABA format. This means that the first, second and fourth line all rhyme, while the third line ends on a different note. Without these versificatory limitations on the writing, the quatrain would not be a ruba’iyah. It would be like writing a limerick without five lines, without the jaunty rhythm, and without rhyming the first, second and last line together and the third and fourth lines together.

All of this is by way of underscoring the fact that, despite each verse’s small size and apparent simplicity, there’s quite a bit of thought that goes into each one. We know that Omar wrote and re-wrote his verses several times, rejecting and polishing them until they were right; in translating them, FitzGerald worked to make them accord with the Islamic verse scheme: throughout his life he worked to refine his translations across five separate published versions. That they seem to flow so effortlessly and speak to us so clearly (despite some clarification as discussed above) is a testament to why they’ve endured as long as they have.

 

*Omar refers obliquely here to his efforts in correcting a calendrical system postulated by the ancient ruler Jamshýd. FitzGerald massages the stanzas loosely into a morning-to-evening format as well as a Spring-to-Winter progression (although this is less well-maintained). The vernal equinox kicks off the Islamic year and thus we have here the New Year bringing forth new life from the plants – Jesus’ healing breath (a mainstay of Islamic doctrine) emerges from the ground to bring back the green growing things. With Winter over, inactive pastimes are put to one side in favour of action and effort – the “thoughtful Soul retires” as new life blooms.