Khayyam again

[steepholm]

When I was in Dublin recently lady_schrapnell and I visited St Patrick’s Cathedral and saw the Door of Reconciliation, a relic of the feud between the Butlers and the Fitzgeralds. I thought of it today as I picked up the Rubaiyat of Edward Fitzgerald, a scion of the latter house.

Fitzgerald would surely have loved LiveJournal:

“Eventually he settled in Boulge, a Suffolk village close to the small market-town of Woodbridge. He became increasingly reluctant to leave the area as he grew older, and excursions to see friends became infrequent... The older Fitzgerald cherished friendship, but at a distance; his enormous and fascinating correspondence is the direct result of this chosen way of life, which made friendship its central concern but a friendship savoured by proxy, in seclusion.”

My father was very fond of Fitzgerald, particularly this quatrain, which he would quote on the slightest pretext:

“Myself when young did eagerly frequent
Doctor and Saint, and heard great Argument
About it and about: but evermore
Came out by the same Door as in I went.”

My own favourite, usually, is this:

"They say the Lion and Lizard keep
The Courts where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep:
And Bahram, that great Hunter – the Wild Ass
Stamps o’er his Head, and he lies fast asleep."

But tonight, I found myself drawn to the more-bleakly-morbid:

“There was a Door to which I found no Key:
There was a Veil past which I could not see:
Some little Talk awhile of ME and THEE
There seemed – and then no more of THEE and ME.”

I've no idea how close all this is to the spirit or meaning of Omar Khayyam: it may well be that in imitating him Fitzgerald, as Ben Jonson said of Spenser, "writ no language". I wish I could write any language half so well.

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