C.D. Warner, et al., comp. The Library of the World’s Best Literature.
An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.

Additional Rubáiyát

By Omar Khayyám (1048–1131)

[These are verses from earlier editions which Edward Fitzgerald either transformed or dropped in others, and one which he never included in his “Eclogue” scheme; but which seem too beautiful or too quaint not to be given.]

AWAKE! for Morning in the Bowl of Night

Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight:

And Lo! the Hunter of the East has caught

The Sultan’s Turret in a Noose of Light.

Dreaming when Dawn’s Left Hand was in the Sky

I heard a Voice within the Tavern cry,

“Awake, my little ones, and fill the Cup

Before Life’s Liquor in its cup be dry.”

AH, fill the Cup: what boots it to repeat

How Time is slipping underneath our Feet:

Unborn To-morrow, and dead Yesterday,

Why fret about them if To-day be sweet?

SAID one,—“Folks of a surly Tapster tell,

And daub his Visage with the Smoke of Hell:

They talk of some strict Testing of us—Pish!

He’s a Good Fellow, and ’twill all be well.”

WERE it not Folly, Spider-like to spin

The Thread of present Life away to win—

What? for ourselves, who know not if we shall

Breathe out the very Breath we now breathe in!

IF but the Vine- and Love-abjuring Band

Are in the Prophet’s Paradise to stand,

Alack, I doubt the Prophet’s Paradise

Were empty as the hollow of one’s Hand.

BE of Good Cheer: the Sullen Month will die,

And a young Moon requite us by-and-by:

Look how the Old one, meagre, bent, and wan

With Age and Fast, is Fainting from the Sky!

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