Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám

This is Edward FitzGerald's mid-nineteenth-century English rendering of Persian quatrains attributed to the eleventh-century mathematician and astronomer Omar Khayyam. The speaker, in a garden with wine, bread, and a companion, questions fate, piety, and the brevity of life, returning to the potter, the tavern, and the rose that lasts a day. The poem is a sequence of independent four-line stanzas rather than a continuous narrative. FitzGerald shaped and reordered the material into a Victorian meditation on doubt and pleasure. The volume is a lyric sequence, not a treatise on astronomy or a life of the historical Khayyam.

Gold slipcase.