Omar Khayyam (2) [Whinfield 1]

At dawn a shout
    awoke us in
     that watering hole…
you crazed
        carousing
            drunk!
Get up and grab that bottle
   let’s finish what we started
            before fate starts to finish us.

Trans Juan Cole
from Whinfield 1

(Khayyam uses a lot of bawdy language, which embarrassed the Victorians. I think it sounds contemporary, like a raw rock song, and don’t think it should be covered up with elevated diction. Wine is a central metaphor for Khayyam. It probably means imbibing the meaning of life. Some have interpreted him as a libertine, and there is no doubt he was a humanist who advised people to enjoy life. Others make him a Sufi mystic and see wine as a symbol of intoxication with God. If wine just meant literally either the good life or divine intoxication, however, then why suggest his drinking companions wake up from their stupor just to drink more? They are missing out on something more than being drunk, whatever “drunk” means.)

For the life and thought of the Iranian humanist, Omar Khayyam, see the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry.

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