The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
FitzGerald's quatrains, more his own poem than a translation, and one of the most quoted in English.
What this poem is
The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám is an 1859 translation from Persian to English by Edward FitzGerald of a selection of quatrains (rubāʿiyāt) attributed to Omar Khayyam (1048–1131), dubbed "the Astronomer-Poet of Persia".
Although commercially unsuccessful at first, FitzGerald's work was popularised from 1861 onward by Whitley Stokes, and the work came to be greatly admired by the Pre-Raphaelites in England. FitzGerald had a third edition printed in 1872, which increased interest in the work in the United States. By the 1880s, the book was extremely popular throughout the English-speaking world, to the extent that numerous "Omar Khayyam clubs" were formed and there was a "fin de siècle cult of the Rubaiyat".
FitzGerald's work has been published in several hundred editions and has inspired similar translation efforts in English, Hindi and many other languages.
Adapted from the Wikipedia article “Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam” (revision 1369554925), used under CC BY-SA 4.0. Laurel's own notes and measurements are not from Wikipedia.
Measured across the book
Across its 704 lines, 97% of stressed syllables fall on the beat (95% interval 96% to 97%). Alliteration runs at 1.35 times what shuffling the words would give (0.41 observed against 0.30 expected). 11% of the lines have a feminine ending.
Baselines and intervals are described in the methods.
Contents
About this text
Public domain. Text from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Project Gutenberg ebook #246. Free to read, print, copy and reuse.