Fitzgerald and the Rubaiyat, In and out of Time (Edward Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam) (Critical Essay‪)‬

This issue of Victorian Poetry commemorates a double anniversary: March 31, 2009 marks both the bicentennial of the birth of Edward FitzGerald and the sesquicentennial of his Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, which was published (give or take a few days) on the poet's fiftieth birthday. (1) It is quite fitting that we should celebrate this occasion and at the same time quite ironic. FitzGerald's poem, after all, seeks to do away with commemoration, and even with time itself: it enjoins the reader to think only of today, abjuring all consideration of past and future. FitzGerald himself, moreover, who never liked birthdays in any case, certainly did not celebrate this one. His dearest friend, William Kenworthy Browne, to whom FitzGerald had been passionately attached ever since their first meeting twenty-seven years earlier, had died only the day before. (2) Browne was still a young man--he had been only sixteen when he met FitzGerald--and his death was the result of an accident. As FitzGerald described it in a letter to Tennyson, while Browne was "Coming home from hunting the end of January, his Horse was kicked by another: reared, and her hind Legs slipping under her, she fell over and on him, crushing all the middle of his Body. He lived two months with a Patience and Vitality that would have left most Men to die in a Week ... and then gave up his Ghost" (Letters, 2:333). Hence it is understandable that, on the day it was published, FitzGerald was thinking very little about his new poem. Yet the Rubaiyat is not entirely unrelated to the death of Browne: FitzGerald's letters from these weeks frequently echo the poem's central motifs, as he himself recognized. Writing a month later about his attempts to reconcile himself to his loss, FitzGerald mentions "poor old Omar who has his kind of Consolation for all these Things" (Letters, 2:334). (3) The letters about Browne share the deep melancholy and resignation of the Rubaiyat, and above all its sense that time has no meaning. Hurrying to Browne's house as soon as he heard of the accident, FitzGerald was not at first admitted to the dying man's bedside, until