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.
