The Rubaiyat: Quatrain XIV

This quatrain is fairly straightforward, and Edward FitzGerald seems to be quite satisfied with it since I can find only minimal changes over the five versions.


First Edition
Quatrain XIV

The Worldly Hope men set their Hearts upon
Turns Ashes--or it prospers; and anon,
Like Snow upon the Desert's dusty Face
Lighting a little Hour or two--is gone.



Second Edition
Quatrain XVII

The Worldly Hope men set their Hearts upon
Turns Ashes--or it prospers; and anon,
Like Snow upon the Desert's dusty Face,
Lighting a little hour or two--was gone.



Fifth Edition
Quatrain XVI

The Worldly Hope men set their Hearts upon
Turns Ashes--or it prospers; and anon,
Like Snow upon the desert's dusty Face,
Lighting a little hour or two--is gone.



The most significant change that I can find, and it's not really that significant, is the change from "is" in the last line in the first edition to "was" in the second edition and then back again to "is" in the fifth edition, thereby going from present tense to past tense to present tense in the final edition. I have, again, no evidence to explain the change, but I could guess that perhaps he felt that it was more consistent if all the verbs in the quatrain were in the present tense.

On the other hand, the fifth edition was published posthumously, so if he had lived another decade or two, we might have had a sixth or perhaps even a seventh edition, for FitzGerald's Rubaiyat has always struck me as being a work in progress.


The theme seems fairly straightforward: regardless of whether people's hopes fail or come true, the results are ultimately the same. One leaves ashes, brief and unsubstantial, while the other, like snow in the desert, lasts only a hour or two, also equally brief and unsubstantial.

This, I think, echoes both the Buddhist and the Taoist teachers who tell us that success and failure are the same and should be viewed in the same light--both are ephemeral and both can quickly become the other. Sophocles suggests something similar at the end of Oedipus Rex when the chorus tells us "let no man be counted blessed in his life/ until he is in the grave."

One last echo is Francois Villon (1431-1489) in his poem, "The Ballad of Dead Ladies," (probably sounds more elegant in French), in which he lists a number of fair and great ladies of the past and ends with a quatrain of his own:

Nay, never ask this week, fair lord,
Where they are gone, nor yet this year,
Save with this much for an overword,--
But where are the snows of yesteryear?"



The brevity of our time here and our dreams has been noted in earlier quatrains and is a persistent theme throughout.