Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

About this book

A cup of wine, a flowering garden and the certainty that life will end: Omar Khayyam's verses return to these images until pleasure and doubt become inseparable.

Edward FitzGerald's celebrated English adaptation gave the Rubaiyat its best-known form in Britain, with intense arguments about fate, time and religious certainty. Its memorable quatrains can sound carefree in one breath and bleak in the next. FitzGerald's memorable English poem is his own literary re-creation of Persian material, and its authorship has a complex history.