Abandon the Day: FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. David Sonstroem
In: The Victorian Newsletter, 1969, no. 36, p. 11-14

EDWARD FITZGERALD’S Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam bravely offers its famous remedy, “A Book of Verses … / A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread-and Thou”, as triumphant insulation against the thought of eternal extinction. But this quatrain, like some other passages expressing optimism or satisfaction, is rather out of keeping with the rest of the poem, whose overall impression is of helpless, sodden pessimism and richly melancholic despair. The poem as a whole offers a suggestive departure from the carpe diem sentiments found in this quatrain, introducing the traditional motif only to belie it. By this means the poem achieves an especially poignant-and peculiarly Victorian-pathos.