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¸é³Ü²úÄå‘i²âÄå³Ù is simply the plural for °ù³Ü²úÄå‘Ä�, a Persian term referring to a quatrain or four-line poem. Therefore there is no need to be put off by the title ¸é³Ü²úá¾±²âá³Ù of Omar Khayyám. Think of the title as Quatrains of Omar Khayyám, or as Four-Line Poems of Omar Khayyám, if that will be more comfortable to you. But don’t miss out on reading these little poems, which hold their own unique power to delight, and additionally may be among the most influential and important poems ever written.

The poemsâ€� author, Omar Khayyám (1048-1131), is one of those polymaths who did everything well and achieved in every field of endeavour. He is known today as “The Astronomer-Poet of Persia,â€� and he excelled not only as an astronomer-poet, but also as mathematician and philosopher. Conducting his work near court, at the time when the Kara-Khanid Khanate and the Seljuq dynasty held power, Omar Khayyám lived amidst the turbulent times of the First Crusade; but one would not know any of that from reading these poems, all of which resound with a full-throated appreciation of life, as when Omar Khayyám calls upon the reader of °ù³Ü²úÄå‘Ä� VII to

Come, fill the Cup, and in the Fire of Spring
The Winter Garment of Repentance fling.
The Bird of Time has but a little way
To fly � and Lo! the Bird is on the Wing.

The reader who is new to the ¸é³Ü²úá¾±²âá³Ù certainly gets a strong sense of the depth and extent of the poemsâ€� influence by the time he or she arrives at °ù³Ü²úÄå‘Ä� XI:

Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,
A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse � and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness �
And Wilderness is Paradise enow.

This sentiment � usually shortened to “a loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and thou� � has no doubt been spoken at many picnics down the years, all over North America and Western Europe. I’m sure that the same idea has been expressed on countless Saint Valentine’s Day greeting cards. Yet how many of those who thus invoke this archetype know that they have a 12th-century Persian poet to thank for the manner in which they thus invoked the spirit of Romance? Not many, I think.`

The brevity and uncertainty of life is a major theme of the ¸é³Ü²úá¾±²âá³Ù, as when Omar Khayyám encourages the reader to seize the day:

Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend,
Before we too into the Dust Descend:
Dust into Dust, and under Dust, to lie,
Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer, and � sans End!

Here, in °ù³Ü²úÄå‘Ä� XXIII, Omar Khayyám sets forth his ideas in a manner that invites comparison with Genesis 3:19 â€� “for dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return.â€�

It is a pleasant thing to travel with Omar Khayyám, who even steps into his own poetry for a moment to invite the reader to travel with him, in °ù³Ü²úÄå‘Ä� XXVI:

Oh, come with old Khayyam, and leave the Wise
To talk; one thing is certain, that Life flies;
One thing is certain, and the Rest is Lies;
The Flower that once has blown for ever dies.

Omar Khayyám, so well-educated and brilliant himself, sets at naught the self-proclaimed wisdom of “Doctor and Saint,â€� of “Saints and Sages,â€� culminating in one unforgettable image from °ù³Ü²úÄå‘Ä� XXIV, addressed to people who focus on either today or tomorrow:

A Muezzin from the Tower of Darkness cries,
“Fools! Your Reward is neither Here nor There.�

I appreciated Omar Khayyám’s invocation, in °ù³Ü²úÄå‘Ä� XXXI, of the Ptolemaic system of astronomy, according to which the Earth was at the center of the Universe, with the sun, moon, and the five then-known planets all revolving in great concentric spheres around the Earth. Thus Omar Khayyám describes his journey up through the Ptolemaic spheres, in search of an answer to the insoluble mysteries of life:

Up from Earth’s Centre through the seventh Gate
I rose, and on the Throne of Saturn sat,
And many Knots unravelled by the Road;
But not the Knot of Human Death and Fate.

And °ù³Ü²úÄå‘Ä� XLVI seemed to evoke the Allegory of the Cave from Plato’s Republic, where prisoners, imprisoned in a cave for all their lives, look at shadows on the back wall of the cave and believe they are seeing reality:

For in and out, above, about, below,
’Tis nothing but a Magic Shadow-Show,
Played in a Box whose Candle is the Sun,
Round which we Phantom Figures come and go.

Another of the most powerful metaphors in the ¸é³Ü²úá¾±²âá³Ù comes when Omar Khayyám, in °ù³Ü²úÄå‘Ä� XLVIX, depicts human beings as little more than game-pieces in the hands of an infinitely more powerful force:

’Tis all a Chequerboard of Nights and Days
Where Destiny, with Men for Pieces, plays:
Hither and thither moves, and mates, and slays,
And one by one back in the Closet lays.

Here, I found myself thinking of images from the Ray Harryhausen movie Jason and the Argonauts (1963). Throughout the film, Zeus and Hera treat Jason of Thessaly’s quest for the Golden Fleece as a game being played on a board, with the bronze giant Talos and the Clashing Rocks and the sea-god Triton as pieces to be deployed as needed for different turns in the game. No doubt many of us, at many different points in our lives, have felt like pawns in some such game.

The history of the Western publication of the ¸é³Ü²úá¾±²âá³Ù is itself just as compelling and intriguing as the poems themselves. In 1859, the English poet Edward FitzGerald published a translation of the ¸é³Ü²úá¾±²âá³Ù of Omar Khayyám; and that translation, initially a failure in financial terms, eventually took off and became a literary and cultural phenomenon. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Ruskin, and other writers and artists of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, with their embrace of colour and spontaneity and their hostility to mannerism, seized upon the ¸é³Ü²úá¾±²âá³Ù as a sort of cultural manifesto â€� and its “exoticâ€� elements contributed to its allure amidst the Orientalism that was such a strong feature of late 19th-century British culture.

Thus the ¸é³Ü²úá¾±²âá³Ù became central to the Western literary conversation. Mark Twain wrote a parody of it in 1898. And when R.M.S. Titanic sank in 1912, with an expensive, jewel-encrusted copy of the ¸é³Ü²úá¾±²âá³Ù on board, the accumulated lore surrounding the poem only grew.

It has influenced literary work by Isaac Asimov, Jorge Luis Borges, Allen Drury, Daphne du Maurier, Christopher Hitchens, James Michener, Eugene O’Neill, Seán O’Casey, O. Henry, Saki, and Rex Stout. There are references to it in all sorts of movies: The Picture of Dorian Grey (1945), Duel in the Sun (1946), Back to the Future (1985), 12 Monkeys (1995). Even Rocky and Bullwinkle, the I Dream of Jeannie television show, and Charles Schulz’s Peanuts comic strip have referenced the ¸é³Ü²úá¾±²âá³Ù.

And another of the most famous lines from the ¸é³Ü²úá¾±²âá³Ù â€� one that many people may not originally identify with this book of poetry â€� comes when Omar Khayyám writes in °ù³Ü²úÄå‘Ä� LI that “The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,/Moves onâ€�.

This °ù³Ü²úÄå‘Ä� may draw upon Chapter 5 of the Book of Daniel, when the wicked Babylonian crown prince Belshazzar, contemptuously drinking from golden cups taken from the Temple of Jerusalem, witnesses unmistakable evidence of divine disapproval of his actions: “In the same hour came forth fingers of a man’s hand, and wrote over against the candlestick upon the plaister of the wall of the king’s palace: and the king saw the part of the hand that wroteâ€� (Daniel 5:5).

Whatever the passage’s origins, it fits right in with Omar Khayyám’s thematic emphasis on the brevity of life; but this line, all by itself, has taken on a life of its own. Agatha Christie gave a 1942 detective novel the title The Moving Finger. The Hollies, the British rock band, made Moving Finger the U.S. title of their 1970 album. Stephen King published his short story “The Moving Finger� in 1990.

And, as a scholar at the University of Leiden has pointed out, the moving-finger image, when combined with the rest of the quatrain � “nor all thy Piety nor Wit/Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,/Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it� � has been used by politicians to emphasize the idea that actions have consequences that cannot be revoked. Martin Luther King Jr. invoked the quatrain in a 1967 speech setting forth the shameful U.S. record in the Vietnam War and calling upon Americans to speak out openly in acknowledgement of the war’s human cost. And then-U.S. President Bill Clinton quoted the line in 1998 to emphasize his awareness that the Monica Lewinsky scandal would always be part of his legacy.

All in all, the ¸é³Ü²úá¾±²âá³Ù are just as challenging now as they were in the time of their publication. The theocrats who rule over contemporary Iran would probably not appreciate this great Persian’s repeated references to the joys of wine â€� even if one can make a good argument that the wine references are meant metaphorically, as an allusion to the idea of enjoying all the good things of life. Nor, I think, would they appreciate Omar Khayyám’s forthright statement that “I myself am Heaven and Hell.â€� But be that as it may, the ¸é³Ü²úá¾±²âá³Ù, many centuries after their composition, still give the reader much food for thought, expressed in quatrains as brief as they are evocative.