The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: Second Edition, Quatrain LXXX

Quatrain  LXXX is linked closely to the previous quatrain, LXXIX.

Second Edition:  Quatrain LXXIX

With Earth's first Clay They did the Last Man knead,
And there of the Last Harvast sow'd the seed:
     And the first Morning of Creation wrote
What the Last Dawn of Reckoning shall read.


As you can see, the previous quatrain leads directly to today's quatrain. 



Second Edition:  Quatrain LXXX

Yesterday, This Day's Madness did prepare:
To-morrow's Silence, Triumph, or Despair:
    Drink! for you know not whence you came, nor why:
Drink!  for you know not why you go, nor where.




Fifth Edition:  Quatrain LXXIV

Yesterday This Day's Madness did prepare;
To-morrow's Silence, Triumph, or Despair:
    Drink! for you know not whence you came, nor why:
Drink!  for you know not why you go, nor where.


Aside from two punctuation changes, a dropped comma after "Yesterday," and the substitution of a semi-colon for a colon after "prepare" (which may have simply been a typesetter's errors), the two versions are the same.

The first two lines bring out a theme that has appeared before this--that of causality.  Today's events or happenings are the result of what happened in the past and will inevitably lead to future consequences.   This suggests predestination or a deterministic universe.   The first two lines still leave the past free if you want to see it that way.  Others may argue for an unbroken chain of events going back to . . .?   On  the other hand, to complicate the issue, we can always bring in Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and Chaos Theory which many now see as refuting any theory of a deterministic universe.

The last two lines restate a very familiar theme:  we don't know where we came from and we don't know where we are going, and we don't know why we are here.  This, of course, strikes directly into the heart of most religions whose basis for their existence is that THEY know all the answers.  The Poet/Narrator clearly has some doubts about this, which he has stated many times throughout the poem.