to FitzGerald of ‘Tiresias,’ Tennyson, after recalling his visit to him and the attempt to follow his host in a spare vegetable diet, concludes that—

But the golden Eastern lay was not all Eastern and Oriental. The last stanza, for example, is not Omar at all, but is almost undiluted FitzGerald —and there is much of FitzGerald’s independent philosophy in the poem as we read it;—now there is a stanza that recalls Homer, now a line that suggests a passage in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, and here again an expression that makes one think of a saying in Goethe’s Conversations with Eckermann. The more than original imagery with which FitzGerald has enriched Omar’s work, and the sustained charm of an original verse-measure make the ideas of the poem appear full of vivid life. These, indeed, centre on the greatest and most pathetic problem known to man; his own existence and his destiny which saddened Virgil—

and which Omar with all his seeking intelligence was impotent to solve, as he resentfully but with pain confesses:—

CLEMENT K. SHORTER.

Introduction to the First Edition

By

Edward Fitzgerald

Omar Khayyám

The Astronomer-Poet of Persia

OMAR KHAYYÁM was born at Naishápúr in Khorassán in the latter half of our Eleventh, and died within the First Quarter of our Twelfth, Century. The slender Story of his Life is curiously twined about that of two other very considerable Figures in their Time and Country: one of them, Hasan al Sabbáh, whose very Name has lengthen’d down to us as a terrible Synonym for Murder: and the other (who also tells the Story of all Three) Nizám al Mulk, Vizyr to Alp the Lion and Malik Shah, Son and Grandson of Toghrul Beg the Tartar, who had wrested Persia from the feeble Successor of Mahmúd the Great, and founded that Seljukian Dynasty which finally roused Europe into the Crusades. This Nizám al Mulk, in his Wasýat—or Testament—which he wrote and left as a Memorial for future Statesmen—relates the following, as quoted in the Calcutta Review, No. lix., from Mirkhond’s History of the Assassins.