The Rubaiyat

A collection of Persian quatrains, or rubāʿiyāt, attributed to Omar Khayyam, the eleventh- and twelfth-century mathematician and astronomer of Nishapur. Which quatrains he actually wrote is uncertain: no manuscript survives from his lifetime, and hundreds of poems were later collected under his name. In English the work is best known through Edward FitzGerald's free adaptation in rhymed verse of 1859, which he revised and enlarged in later editions. The poems return again and again to the same questions. Life is brief and passes like water or wind; the dead do not come back to tell us anything; scholars and saints argue but learn nothing certain about what lies beyond; and fate writes once and does not revise. Against this uncertainty the speaker praises wine, friendship, gardens and the present moment. Readers have taken the poems as hedonism, as religious scepticism or, in some Sufi readings, as mystical allegory in which wine stands for divine love.

It is the most famous poetic expression of doubt about the afterlife and of living in the present, and it raises sharp questions about fate, meaning and religious certainty in a few lines.