Life's Pleasures Quote by Edward Fitzgerald

Guilt, seduction, and a sly little market critique all swirl in Fitzgerald's lines, which borrow the voice of the Rubaiyat to make intoxication feel both intimate and transactional. Wine "has played the Infidel" is deliciously double-edged: it casts drink as a faithless lover and as a heretic force, something that lures you from sober pieties and then leaves you spiritually undressed. The "Robe of Honor" is reputation, self-command, maybe even social standing - the public costume of dignity - and the verb "robbed" makes it feel less like a mistake than a mugging. He isn't confessing so much as staging a mock-trial where desire gets to plead.

Then comes the pivot that makes the stanza bite. Instead of moralizing, he wonders about the vintners: what do they purchase "one half so precious" as what they sell? It's a question posed like a shrug, but it lands as an accusation. The people who profit from pleasure are implied to be buying their own salvation - or at least their distance from consequence - with the very currency that ruins others. It hints at an early, recognizable modern anxiety: industries built on controlled excess (alcohol, vice, distraction) depend on consumers paying twice, once in money and again in self-respect.

Context matters here: Fitzgerald is translating/transforming Omar Khayyam for Victorian readers, and the poem's famous trick is to smuggle skepticism and sensuality through "Eastern" costume. The result is a speaker who can be both penitent and defiant, sounding ashamed of indulgence while quietly admiring how irresistible it is - and how neatly someone else bottles it for sale.