Dear Haijin, visitors and travelers,
Welcome at the last episode of our wonderful CDHK month about "The Rubaiyat" by Omar Khayyam. It was a joy and a honor to bring you these quatrains. They are all extraordinary beautiful and I hope that you all have found in some way satisfaction and appreciation for this great Persian poet.
As I told you yesterday the last episodes will be short, only the quatrain and my thoughts about it.
Here is our last quatrain for this month and maybe ... I will create another CDHK month about the poetry of Omar Khayyam. There are a lot of quatrains written by him so I think we can do another month about his poetry next year.
Here is our quatrain for today, I titled it "Moon of My Delight" and that title sounds like music in my ears, because my "big love" "the moon" is all present here.
Ah, Moon of my Delight who know'st no wane,
The Moon of Heav'n is rising once again:
How oft hereafter rising shall she look
Through this same Garden after me - in vain!
© Omar Khayyam (Tr. FitzGerald)
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| Moon of My Delight (René Bull) |
“Moon of my Delight” is the Poet’s Beloved, she being constant, unlike the Moon of Heaven, which waxes and wanes as the month goes by. The meaning of the last two lines is that there will come a time when the Moon of Heaven looks down upon the Poet’s Garden, but will no longer find him there, because he will be dead. Incidentally, it is an easily missed fact that the rising Moon in this verse, at the end of the poem, pairs with the rising Sun in verse 1 at the beginning, the whole poem thus effectively following the course of Omar’s musings through a symbolic day, from Sunrise to Moonrise. Did FitzGerald intend this from the beginning, or did he only notice it later? It is a fact that FitzGerald only pointed out the Sunrise to Moonrise progression in a letter written to his publisher Bernard Quaritch in 1872, fully thirteen years after the appearance of the first edition. Talking of Omar, he wrote:
“He begins with Dawn pretty sober and contemplative: then as he thinks and drinks, grows savage, blasphemous, etc, and then again sobers down into melancholy at nightfall.”
Well isn't that a coincedence? We started with 'dawn' and with this last verse of this month we will end with the rise of the moon. The circle of life closed again. A month of joy closed ...
dawn
until down
moonrise
© Chèvrefeuille (experimental haiku)
This episode is open for your submissions tonight at 7:00 PM (CET) and will remain open until December 6th at noon (CET). I will try to publish our new episode, the first of a new month, later on. For now ... have fun! And thank you for participating in this wonderful CDHK month about Omar Khayyam's "The Rubaiyat".
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