The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: Quatrain LI

Quatrain LI is one of my favorites, and FitzGerald must have been satisfied with it also.


First Edition: Quatrain LI

The Moving Finger writes; and having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.



Second Edition: Quatrain LXXVI

The Moving Finger writes; and having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.



Fifth Edition: Quatrain LXXI

The Moving Finger writes; and having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.


As far as I can see, FitzGerald made only two changes--the substitution of the more prosaic "your" in the second and fourth lines in the later editions, for the more poetic "thy." Being somewhat perverse in these matters, I prefer "thy" for it seems, at least to me, to flow much more smoothly: "thy tears" as opposed to "your tears."

I think the reference to the "Moving Finger" that "writes" comes from The Old Testament, specifically the Book of Daniel, 5: 1-4. This is the account of Belshazzar's Feast in which sacred vessels taken from Solomon's Temple were being used in rituals to the Babylonian gods. A hand appears and writes Mene, Mene, Teqel, Upharsin on the wall, a foretelling of the approaching fall of the Babylonian empire.

It relates, therefore, back to the previous quatrains which point out that we have no control over our fate or destiny, for it is determined by powers outside our ken and there's nothing we can do to prevent or even modify it.

This is part of what I see as an element of predestination in The Rubaiyat. I haven't read any of the other translations so I can't say whether this is present in Khayyam's quatrains or is something introduced by FitzGerald.