A Thousand Blossoms...

VIII.

“And look – a thousand Blossoms with the Day

Woke – and a thousand scatter’d into Clay:

And this first Summer Month that brings the Rose

Shall take Jamshýd and Kaikobád away.”

There are collectors out there who disdain efforts of others to spoof their favourite work; I’m not one of them. For me the fact that there are gently mocking or imitative versions of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam out there only serves to underscore how universally embraced and accepted it was. I’ve seen “The Rubaiyat of a Persian Kitten”, “The Bachelor’s Rubaiyat” and “The Rubaiyat of a Golfer” to name a few. Most of these are simply humorous takes on the original and are pretty funny in and of themselves.

The following is a short story written by H.H. Munro, who wrote under the (appropriate) pen-name “Saki”. Taken from his collection of short pieces following his incorrigible social butterfly Reginald, this tale explores the vicious fop’s foray into the penning of poems.

 

Reginald’s Rubaiyat

'The other day (confided Reginald), when I was killing time in the bathroom and making bad resolutions for the New Year, it occurred to me that I would like to be a poet. The chief qualification, I understand, is that you must be born. Well, I hunted up my birth certificate, and found that I was all right on that score, and then I got to work on a Hymn to the New Year, which struck me as having possibilities. It suggested extremely unusual things to absolutely unlikely people, which I believe is the art of first-class catering in any department. Quite the best verse in it went something like this –

“Have you heard the groan of a gravelled grouse,

Or the snarl of a snaffled snail

(Husband or mother, like me, or spouse),

Have you lain a-creep in the darkened house

Where the wounded wombats wail?”

It was quite improbable that anyone had, you know, and that’s where it stimulated the imagination and took people out of their narrow, humdrum selves. No one has ever called me narrow or humdrum, but even I felt worked up now and then at the thought of that house with the stricken wombats in it. It simply wasn’t nice. But the editors were unanimous in leaving it alone; they said the thing had been done before and done worse, and that the market for that sort of work was extremely limited.

It was just on top of that discouragement that the Duchess wanted me to write something in her album – something Persian, you know, and just a little bit decadent – and I thought a quatrain on an unwholesome egg would meet the requirements of the case. So I started in with –

“Cackle, cackle, little hen,

How I wonder if and when

Once you laid the egg that I

Met, alas! too late. Amen.”

The Duchess objected to the Amen, which I thought gave an air of forgiveness and chose jugée to the whole thing; also she said it wasn’t Persian enough, as though I were trying to sell her a kitten whose mother had married for love rather than pedigree. So I recast it entirely, and the new version read –

“The hen that laid thee moons ago, who knows

In what Dead Yesterday her shades repose;

To some election turn thy waning span

And rain thy rottenness on fiscal foes.”

I thought there was enough suggestion of decay in that to satisfy a jackal, and to me there was something infinitely pathetic and appealing in the idea of the egg having a sort of St. Luke’s summer of commercial usefulness. But the Duchess begged me to leave out any political allusions; she’s the president of a Women’s Something or other, and she said it might be taken as an endorsement of deplorable methods. I never can remember which Party Irene discourages with her support, but I shan’t forget an occasion when I was staying at her place and she gave me a pamphlet to leave at the house of a doubtful voter, and some grapes and things for a woman who was suffering from a chill on the top of a patent medicine. I thought it much cleverer to give the grapes to the former and the political literature to the sick woman, and the Duchess was quite absurdly annoyed about it afterwards. It seems the leaflet was addressed “To those about to wobble” – I wasn’t responsible for the silly title of the thing – and the woman never recovered; anyway, the voter was completely won over by the grapes and jellies, and I think that should have balanced matters. The Duchess called it bribery, and said it might have compromised the candidate she was supporting; he was expected to subscribe to church funds and chapel funds, and football and cricket clubs and regattas, and bazaars and beanfests and bellringers, and poultry shows and ploughing matches, and reading-rooms and choir outings, and shooting trophies and testimonials, and anything of that sort; but bribery would not have been tolerated.

I fancy I have perhaps more talent for electioneering than for poetry, and I was really getting extended over this quatrain business. The egg began to be unmanageable, and the Duchess suggested something with a French literary ring about it. I hunted back in my mind for the most familiar French classic that I could take liberties with, and after a little exercise of memory I turned out the following –

“Hast thou the pen that once the gardener had?

I have it not; and know, these pears are bad.

Oh larger than the horses of the Prince

Are those the general drives in Kaikobad.”

Even that didn’t altogether satisfy Irene; I fancy the geography of it puzzled her. She probably thought Kaikobad was an unfashionable German spa, where you’d meet matrimonial bargain-hunters and emergency Servian kings. My temper was beginning to slip its moorings by that time; I look rather nice when I lose my temper. (I hoped you would say I lose it very often. I mustn’t monopolise the conversation.)

“Of course, if you want something really Persian and passionate, with red wine and bulbuls in it,” I went on to suggest; but she grabbed the book away from me.

“Not for worlds. Nothing with red wine or passion in it. Dear Agatha gave me the album, and she would be mortified to the quick” –

I said I didn’t quite believe Agatha had a quick, and we got quite heated in arguing the matter. Finally, the Duchess declared I shouldn’t write anything nasty in her book, and I said I wouldn’t write anything in her nasty book, so there wasn’t a very wide point of difference between us. For the rest of the afternoon I pretended to be sulking, but I was really working back to that quatrain, like a fox-terrier that’s buried a deferred lunch in a private flower-bed. When I got an opportunity I hunted up Agatha’s autograph, which had the front page all to itself, and, copying her prim handwriting as well as I could, I inserted above it the following Thibetan fragment:-

“With Thee, oh, my Beloved, to do a dâk

(a dâk I believe is a sort of uncomfortable post-journey)

On the pack-saddle of a grunting yak,

With never room for chilling chaperone,

‘Twere better than a Panhard in the Park.”

That Agatha would get on to a yak in company with a lover even in the comparative seclusion of Thibet is unthinkable. I very much doubt if she’d do it with her own husband in the privacy of the Simplon tunnel. But poetry, as I’ve remarked before, should always stimulate the imagination.

By the way, when you asked me the other day to dine with you on the 14^th, I said I was dining with the Duchess. Well, I’m not. I’m dining with you.'

 

H.H. Munro wrote a slew of stories, most of which, like this piece, are needle-sharp critiques of the society in which he lived, penned in vitriol. Reginald, and Munro’s other fashionable wastrel Clovis, waft through their upper class society leaving trails of mischievous destruction in their wakes. Like FitzGerald/Omar’s cup-bearer, Saki, after whom he chose his nom-de-plume, Munro offers a cup brimful of wonderful entertainment, guaranteed to make the reader laugh out loud.

Sadly, Munro chose to defend his country in the Great War and, eschewing a comfortable commission which would have placed him out of harm’s way, fought side-by-side with the enlisted men in the thick of battle. It was a tragic case of a thousand blossoms waking with the day, and a thousand scatter’d into Clay.

 

“Saki”

Hector Hugh Munro

18/12/1870 – 13/11/1916

R.I.P.