Lions & Lizards...

XVII

“They say the Lion and the Lizard keep

The Courts where Jamshýd gloried and drank deep;

And Bahrám, that great Hunter – the Wild Ass

Stamps o’er his Head, and he lies fast asleep.”

There’s been quite a lot in the news lately about lions, so I figured this was a good time to contribute my two-cent’s worth.

What is this stanza saying? Essentially, it’s reinforcing previous rubai’s by saying that the works of individual humans are short-lived and impermanent. Jamshýd was a legendary ruler of yore to the Persians and created many great works, including a famous cup which was referenced in stanza 5. He built magnificent palaces and entertained lavishly in them. Now he’s dead and his castles are all in ruins.

FitzGerald is playing the Romantic card with this verse. Not the melodramatic, treacly, Hallmark-card of Romance, but the Nineteenth Century aesthetic movement one, which cleaved to all things natural – after the teachings of Ruskin (who, ironically, couldn’t cope with “natural” when he saw it) - especially the wilder, moodier, gloomier side of the Old Dame.

“Nature is eternal”, say the Romantics; “after we are gone, only nature will remain to erase all our achievements”. That was all well and good, back in the day, but now, humanity has all kinds of methods to ensure that, once we’re done with the planet and our time upon it, Mother Nature is not going to be a sure bet to lift herself off the canvas. Lions are an ever-diminishing quantity and Lizards are being out-gunned by climate change.

Bahrám, the other guy mentioned in this verse, was a famous hunter in ancient Iran, and the “Wild Ass”, or Onager, was his quarry of choice. In his time, being a hunter of high repute was something that could be called employment, and it was seriously dangerous: arrows, swords, and spears really levelled the playing field between all parties in those days, making the contest decidedly more equal. If it were possible for Bahrám to run into a certain American Dentist of ill-fame, I’m sure he would have a few things to say about his technique, like hunting actual, wild, undomesticated lions, without hi-tech, laser-sighted bows, and without guys in train carrying high-powered rifles to pull your fat out of the fire when you screw up. Not that I’m lauding any kind of hunter; let me be clear: nowadays, the Onager is extinct in Europe and Asia, and certainly Mr. Bahrám had a hand in that. Unfortunately, we live at a time when anything natural that isn’t being passively destroyed en-masse by our mere presence, is being actively slaughtered by testosteronal A-holes with performance issues to address. If only these morons would be content with watching DVDs of bikini-clad women shooting automatic weaponry in quarry pits, it would be okay; but no, they have to get out there and have a go themselves.

Here’s a thought, especially since it’s a Shark Year, that cyclical time when sharks roam further afield than usual and folks in Byron Bay and Perth forget that it happens every 4-5 years, get all twitchy and start talking about “culls” and “netting”: round up all the “he-man” hunters out there and dump them in the oceans with a steak knife each. Problem solved.

There are two copies of the Rubaiyat from which I’ve drawn images for this post: the first is illustrated by Robert Stewart Sherriffs, whose set of illustrations is one of my favourites; the other is taken from Margaret Caird’s set of pictures and is taken from an octavo Collins copy of the poem – usually, I come across the duodecimo version with a single image used as a frontispiece, so obtaining this volume was a definite bonus.

FitzGerald, Edward (G.F. Maine, Ed.; Robert Stewart Sherriffs, illus.), Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, Rendered into English verse with an Introduction by Laurence Housman, Collins Clear-Type Press, London, 1947.

Quarto; full royal-blue leather, with gilt spine and upper board titles and decorations on red labels, and a royal blue ribbon; 222pp., all edges gilt, with a full-colour frontispiece and 11 plates likewise. Some sunning to the board edges and spine; chipping to the leather at the spine head; retailer’s bookplate to the front pastedown; mild scattered foxing to the preliminaries; corners bumped with some minor fraying. Very good.

FitzGerald, Edward (Margaret Caird, illus.), Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, Rendered into English verse with an Introduction by Laurence Housman, Collins Clear-Type Press, London, nd. (c.1920s).

Octavo; hardcover in decorated cloth, with decorative endpapers; 56pp., with a monochrome frontispiece and four plates likewise. Mild sunning to the board edges and spine; spine lightly cracked; softening to the spine extremities; some mild toning to the text block edges. Lacks dustwrapper. Very good.