High Piping Pehlevi...

VI.

“And David’s lips are lock’t; but in divine

High piping Pehleví, with ‘Wine! Wine! Wine!

Red Wine!’ – the Nightingale cries to the Rose

That yellow Cheek of hers to incarnadine.”*

 

The previous stanza is basically a list of things that time has done away with and which are lost forever, irrecoverable. This verse continues that summation; but then goes on to speak of things that remain constant and unchanging despite the ravaging of the passing years. ‘Wine’ remains fixed, and in this sense, Omar (and, by extension, FitzGerald) is talking about divine, intoxicating, Love, rather than vino, but the more prosaic reading is still there.

Taking a line from Háfiz, FitzGerald makes a distinction between the language of human beings which is flexible and mutable and alters according to circumstance and need, and compares it with the mystical language of birds, which – to his way of thinking – remains unchanged over the centuries. Thus, the words of King David are stilled and lost to us in a way that the Nightingale’s song is not.

Here we are also walking through a seasonal “spring” in the unfolding of the poem; the flowers are still just blooming and as Spring progresses, heralded by the Nightingale’s song, the flowers come into their colour, sloughing off the faded past of the previous Winter. Thus, it seems as if the song of the Nightingale brings a blush of red to the metaphoric cheek of the Rose.

 

It’s quite likely that Oscar Wilde drew upon this image when he wrote his children’s fairy tales. They are, by and large, a gloomy, cynical bunch of stories that are dubious fodder for young minds, but there is one wherein a Poet, longing for the love of a Beauty and wishing he had a perfect Rose to offer her, is aided by a Nightingale that thrusts itself upon a thorn whilst singing its swansong. The rose bush blooms into a single bud of perfection as the bird expires and the Poet takes it to the Beauty who snubs him and his gift. In disgust, he throws the flower into the gutter. End of story; lesson learned.

We are however, not looking at Wilde’s jaded world but rather Omar and FitzGerald’s gently musing one.

This is a tricky section of the poem, wherein FitzGerald is trying to fit Omar’s imagery into a shape that modern readers will understand. Omar’s goal for his verses was to try and make each an entity unto itself; FitzGerald breaks this mould a little by making verses run into each other every now and then in order to round out an idea. This is one instance where the previous stanza rolls over into the following one to continue a thought to its conclusion.

 

Professor Cowell was not a fan of FitzGerald’s efforts and felt that FitzGerald’s first duty was to the language and its resolution into English, rather than attempting to preserve the original writer’s concepts. Other commentators were even more critical: Cowell’s French counterpart and correspondent Professor J.B. Nicolas was incensed by FitzGerald’s work and, in 1867, published his own “superior” version in French. Nicolas went on to coach other English speakers to improve upon FitzGerald: best known of these is the English writer Jessie Cadell, who worked on her version whilst trying to recover from tuberculosis in Pisa. She too, was highly critical of FitzGerald’s work. Her translation was published posthumously in 1899 and faded into obscurity along with that of her mentor; another printing of her effort was released in 2005 amidst a general interest in trying to find other points of entry into Omar’s quatrains, but it has found only academic rather than a popular interest.

In response to all this negativity, FitzGerald was fairly indifferent. Responding to E.B. Cowell’s lengthy diatribe on linguistic adherence versus poetic intention, he simply said:

“Better a live Sparrow, than a stuffed Eagle”

thereby displaying his preference for something alive and dynamic over something lofty yet dead. And then he went on to publish other versions of the poem with the same rationale and enthusiastic popular reception, in 1868, 1872, 1879 and posthumously, in 1889.

The nay-sayers would seem to have been little more than one hit wonders.

 

*“Pehleví, the old Heroic Sanskrit of Persia. Háfiz also speaks of the Nightingale’s Pehleví which did not change with the People’s.” (EFG)