40 pages • 1 hour read
Omar Khayyam"The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam"
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1100A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Flowers, Gardens, and Birds
Pastoral (natural) imagery was an important feature of medieval Persian poetry; additionally, romanticized images of nature were popular in Fitzgerald’s England. England in the mid-19th century was also witnessing the influence of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, painters and poets devoted to capturing the true essence of nature as shown in 14th- and 15th-century Italian painting. With England’s colonial enterprise at its zenith, images from the supposedly exotic, mystical Orient too were much in demand. Given all these factors, it is perhaps natural that Fitzgerald’s translation be filled with flowers, gardens, and birds. To the traditional Persian imagery, Fitzgerald brought an additional meaning of Victorian flower symbolism, making the pastoral images even richer in meaning to its Victorian reader. The rose in Persian tradition symbolized perfection and beauty, as well as inscrutable divinity. (The rose is similarly associated with Christ in Christian tradition). For Khayyam, flowers represent both the timelessness of nature, as well as the time-bound life of all natural living things. (“And look—a thousand Blossoms with the Day / Woke—and a thousand scatter’d into Clay” (Lines 29-30); In Victorian floriography, the red rose symbolized love, while a deeper crimson shade stood for mourning. The purple hyacinth (Verse 18) symbolized sorrow. The sorrow motif, as well as flower imagery existing in parallel with the awareness of death and bleeding (Verse 18, where every rose which blooms draws from the blood of a stabbed Caesar and every hyacinth from a buried loveliness), depict the bittersweet nature of existence. The pastoral beauty of the garden too is tinged with the awareness that grass often grows over corpses. In that sense, the garden in “The Rubaiyat” represents the world itself, witnessing the repeated cycle of birth and death.
Birds in “The Rubaiyat” signify the flight of time, as well as the onset of dawn (the cock’s crowing in Verse 3). In both senses, birds are associated with an urgency to act and seize the day. The bird’s lightness and fragility symbolize the fleeting, breakable nature of mortal life. One of the most interesting metaphors of “The Rubaiyat” and the Persian poetic tradition arises when the nightingale and rose motifs come together (Verse 6). Called the “gul-o-bulbul” motif in Persian symbolism (gul being the flower, and the bulbul the nightingale; both words rhyming roughly with “pull”), the image depicts a nightingale impaled by the breast on a rose thorn. The story goes that originally the Nightingale could not sing very well, and all Roses were white. One day the Nightingale fell in love with the Rose and flocked to it. Love inspired the Nightingale’s first melodious song, but in a clamor to be near the Rose, the Nightingale impaled itself on its thorn. The Nightingale’s blood turned the Rose crimson. The Rose would be pale and sick without the Nightingale’s life-blood, and the Nightingale would lack its song without the Rose to love. Thus, the Rose and the bird with a thorn in its heart are locked in an eternal embrace, symbolizing variously the perfect lovers; the perfect sacrifice (on the part of the Nightingale, who bleeds to give the Rose her color); and in Sufi tradition, the Soul’s bird yearning to lose itself in the Divinity of the Rose. In Verse 6, the nightingale’s song is in Pahlavi (literally “the first”) or the purest, most ancient Farsi, and pipes only one word, which is wine. Thus, like blood infuses color in the rose, wine infuses life in the speaker.
Sun, Lamps, and Moon
The poem utilizes complex imagery—sources of light, heavenly bodies like the stars, and literal darkness—to illustrate the nature of existence. The sun is often associated with a horse, a race, and a hunt, such as in Verse 1, when the sun kickstarts the day’s hunt by casting a stone in night’s cup (according to Fitzgerald’s notes, the dropping of the stone was a call to begin the day’s hunt in medieval Persia). In Verse 54, the sun is described as a flaming horse. The idea of the sun’s horse is widespread across cultures, from the steeds of Phaeton in Greek mythology to the seven horses of Surya in the Vedic (ancient Indian) corpus. Drawing on the association of the sun with the day’s rhythms, the sun in “The Rubaiyat” represents the urgent passage of time.
While the sun symbolism is clearer, the motif of the lamp is quite complex in “The Rubaiyat.” The lamp sheds light, but its light is limited. In Verse 33, the speaker equates the lamp guiding destiny’s little dark-engulfed children (humans) to a “blind understanding” (Line 132). Thus, the lamp is tricky or false and fails to light the way, offering only obliviousness or a lack of self-awareness as a means to keep on one’s path. Verse 46 paints the world as a shadow show powered by a lantern or a candle. Because the world is all shadows, it is impermanent. In this verse even the sun becomes a candle whose light cannot be understood. The association with Plato’s allegory of the cave adds to the sense of limited knowledge. In the allegory, Plato likened most humans to a group of people who have lived chained to the wall of a cave all their lives, facing a blank wall. The people watch shadows projected on the wall from objects passing in front of a fire behind them and give names to these shadows. The shadows are the reality of the cave people, but they are not accurate representations of the real world. The conflation with the Platonic allegory suggests a reference to the limits of human understanding, which no sun or lamp can fully illuminate. The Light of Truth can be glimpsed only in moments (Verse 56).
Unlike the broad Western poetic tradition, where the moon can sometimes be depicted in conjunction with madness and melancholy, in “The Rubaiyat,” the moon is also associated with delight and constancy (the speaker’s beloved in Verse 74), as well as the pious month of Ramzan (In Ramzan, more popularly known as Ramadan, the appearance of the crescent moon signifies the end of fasting and the approach of festive Eid; Verse 59). Night is treated neutrally, much like day, instead of symbolizing metaphorical darkness. In Verse 49, life is a checker board of nights and days, while in Verse 16, nights and days are doorways of the caravanserai of night. The poem’s ease with night may stem from a custom to which Verse 38 alludes, the nighttime journey which people would undertake in medieval Arabia and Persia to escape the day’s heat. In the poem’s last verses, the night imagery is particularly beautiful, with the grass described as scattered with stars. At a symbolic level, the beautiful night imagery conflated with the fantasy of the speaker’s demise signifies an acceptance of the end of the day, and therefore the idea of death. Death and darkness are not necessarily fearsome, but more inevitable and factual.
Clay, Vessels, and Wine
The clay motif of “The Rubaiyat” functions both literally and as a metaphor. In the literal sense it is the earth in which corpses are buried, and from which flowers grow. Symbolically, clay holds a range of meanings, from death to transience to the powerlessness of human beings to humans themselves. In “The Rubaiyat,” clay becomes a shorthand for people. An idea emerges of people being created by an unknown potter, like a pot from wet clay. In this image, the wetness of the clay is at odds with the dryness of dust. In Verse 36, the speaker imagines that the wet clay the potter thumps murmurs for mercy: “Gently, Brother, gently, pray!” (Line 144). Thus, the wetness of the clay is associated with docility and victimization, which highlights the poem’s sometimes pessimistic attitude towards creation and human destiny. The agony of the wet clay—which could represent birth and life—seems as bad as the dry oblivion of dust. It is suggested both aspects of human existence are equally futile.
In the Kuza-Nama, the pots lining the potter’s shop are described as “clay population” (Line 236) and “that Earthen Lot” (Line 237), clearly referring to human beings. The idea of humans as clay pots or dolls is not new to “The Rubaiyat” but widespread in religious and mythological tradition. In the Bible, people are often compared to clay in the hands of the divine potter. For instance, consider this line: “Like clay in the hand of the potter, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel” (The Bible. New International Version, Jeremiah 18:6). In the Greek tradition, the demigod Prometheus kneads humans from clay, while the goddess Athena animates the mud figures.
Significantly, clay is also the material from which the earthen wine goblet is created. This gives the poem an easy segue from themes of despair to irreverence and the celebration of life, short as it may be. To close the Kuza-Nama, a pot states: “My Clay with long oblivion is gone dry: / But, fill me with the old familiar Juice, / Methinks I might recover by-and-bye!” (Lines 258-60) The time for existential musing is done. The pot, representing the speaker, now wants to be filled with wine and recover from sadness. Thus, the clay and wine motifs often come together in the text, with wine, rather than the soul, being the animating force or elixir that gives clay life. The idea is intentionally subversive, treating metaphysics flippantly. Flippancy should be the order of the day, the text often implies, given that existence is anyway ephemeral. However, wine could also be the light of truth that makes the clay vessel accept its reality. Note how the clay vessel filled with juice sounds more empowered than the beaten wet clay. Human existence is miserable; but the speaker chooses to fill his vessel with wine or critical truth rather than unquestioning faith. Thus, he wrests from the fates some power for himself.
