Page:Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, the astronomer-poet of Persia (IA ru00biytofomaromarrich).pdf/20

xii himself and all about him, (as in his own sublime Description of the Roman Theatre,) coloured with the lurid reflex of the Curtain that was suspended between them and the outer Sun. Omar, more desperate, or more careless, of any such laborious System as resulted in nothing more than hopeless Necessity, flung his own Genius and Learning with a bitter jest into the general Ruin which their insufficient glimpses only served to reveal; and, yielding his Senses to the actual Rose and Vine, only diverted his thoughts by balancing ideal possibilities of Fate, Freewill, Existence and Annihilation; with an oscillation that so generally inclined to the negative and lower side, as to make such Stanzas as the following exceptions to his general Philosophy—

Oh, if my Soul can fling his Dust aside, And naked on the Air of Heaven ride, It's not a Shame, it's not a Shame for Him So long in this Clay Suburb to abide!

Or is that but a Tent, where rests anon A Sultán to his Kingdom passing on, And which the swarthy Chamberlain shall strike Then when the Sultán rises to be gone?

With regard to the present Translation. The original Rubáiyát (as, missing an Arabic Guttural, these Tetrastichs are more musically called), are independent Stanzas, consisting each of four Lines of equal, though varied, Prosody, sometimes all rhyming, but oftener (as here attempted) the third line suspending the Cadence by which the last atones with the former Two. Something as in the Greek Alcaic, where the third line seems to lift and suspend the