Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám

These Persian quatrains, composed in the eleventh and twelfth centuries and long associated with the mathematician Omar Khayyam of Nishapur, treat wine, mortality, fate, and the limits of pious certainty. Each rubai is a four-line unit, often with a turn in the last line. Speakers drink in a garden, question the afterlife, mock the preacher, and accept that clay, dust, and the potter's wheel are the human condition. There is no continuous narrative: the book is a sequence of lyrics on pleasure and transience. Later readers know the poems largely through Edward FitzGerald's Victorian English versions, which select and recast the Persian stanzas into a single sceptical voice.

Bound in red brocade with a design in silver and gold. Pale blue-green endleaves. Gold clamshell box with a red paper label.