Poetry Collection: The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

Overview
Elbert Hubbard’s 1899 Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is a sumptuous Roycroft Press rendering of Edward FitzGerald’s celebrated English quatrains, set within the Arts and Crafts ethos that defined Hubbard’s publishing vision. The volume presents Khayyam’s meditations on time, fate, pleasure, and doubt as a continuous lyric experience, inviting readers to inhabit a world of gardens, taverns, and star-strewn skies where the questions of faith and the meaning of life are weighed against the briefness of human days.

The Roycroft Framing
Hubbard introduces the poem as the candid counsel of a genial skeptic, a voice that prefers honest enjoyment and present-tense gratitude over metaphysical assurances. In the Roycroft spirit, he treats FitzGerald as a creative collaborator rather than a literal translator, praising the English quatrains as a new poem with an ancient soul. The book’s artisanal design, careful typography, decorative initials, and hand-crafted feel, mirrors the text’s core argument: that beauty and immediacy redeem the ordinary. This framing places Khayyam within a democratic art of living, where wisdom is found in a shared loaf, a cup of wine, and companionship.

Structure and Voice
The sequence unfolds like a day in spring: dawn stirs the garden; the speaker turns from scholars’ disputes to the saki’s brimming cup; noon’s brightness gives way to the contemplations of evening and the hush of mortality. FitzGerald’s supple English quatrains sustain a single, companionable voice, urbane, amused, occasionally bitter, always lucid. The poem’s apparent simplicity conceals a careful architecture: tavern scenes and rose imagery recur as leitmotifs; the clay-potter parable and the wheel of heaven reappear to test the reader’s resolve in the face of destiny’s indifference.

Themes and Imagery
At the center stands carpe diem: the call to seize what joy can be seized before the “Moving Finger” writes and moves on. Wine is emblem and sacrament, a distilled answer to unanswerable riddles, at once literal pleasure and metaphor for the spirit that interrupts the grind of time. The garden mirrors the human condition, budding, blooming, and falling, while the night sky’s “inverted bowl” seals the world within inscrutable law. Khayyam’s skepticism is not rancorous; he twits mullahs and sages with equal ease, but he also admits the ache for meaning that dogma does not soothe. Love appears as companionate presence, “a loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and Thou”, less passion than solace, a pact against impermanence.

Fate, Freedom, and the Potter’s Wheel
The famous image of the potter’s wheel wrestles with predestination: the clay, once living dust, shaped into vessels that lament their helpless trajectory. The poem refuses a tidy solution, holding in tension the allure of free will and the evidence of cosmic fixity. In this irresolution lies its peculiar comfort. If the heavens are mute, then the humane response is to beautify the moment at hand, work well, love well, drink well, and speak plainly.

Hubbard’s Contribution and Cultural Moment
By 1899 the Rubaiyat had become an Anglo-American touchstone, and Hubbard’s edition amplified its reach in the United States. The Roycroft presentation makes the book itself an argument: craftsmanship is a philosophy, not merely a style. Hubbard’s accompanying remarks set Khayyam alongside the Roycrofters’ creed of honest labor and simple elegance, recasting medieval Persian verse as guidance for modern readers wearied by industrial hurry and sectarian certainty.

Enduring Appeal
Hubbard’s Rubaiyat endures as both poem and artifact: FitzGerald’s mellifluous quatrains speaking for Khayyam’s urbane doubt, and a hand-wrought book that embodies the counsel it commends. It leaves the reader with a clarified appetite for the present and a courteous skepticism toward consolations that cost the day itself.