By John M. Radosta
When Omar Khayyám began writing quatrains, called rubáiyát in his native Persian, it was perhaps to escape from his extensive work on algebra and astronomy.[1] He could not have had any idea that his poetry would become the first link in a chain of collaboration that stretched ten centuries or more into the future. Among the most prominent luminaries who have come under Khayyám’s spell are T.S. Eliot and Woody Guthrie. But one of the most important links, one that encompasses both Eliot and Guthrie, is Bob Dylan. From the “Persian drunkard” in “Absolutely Sweet Marie” to the many direct allusions on the 2012 album Tempest, and culminating on 2020’s Rough and Rowdy Ways, Dylan has filled his cup with Omar’s views and fermented them into his own poetic transformations. Both of these artists have fomented change through long term impacts on society, and in conversation across millennia they continue to decant their ideas in ever-fresh vintages.
On first listen “Absolutely Sweet Marie,” from the 1966 double album Blonde on Blonde, is a fun crash of non sequiturs, set to a rollicking tune. Here and there, odd turns of phrase reveal themselves to be, as often happens in a Dylan song, allusions to many other poetic performances. For example, the line “when I was half sick,” which comes from Part II of Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shallot.” These allusions add to the fun of the song, but it’s the “Persian drunkard” that follows the singer who garners the most interest here. The drunkard has long been recognized as Omar Khayyám, the tenth-century Persian author of a collection of quatrains known in their English translation as The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám by Edward FitzGerald. The cameo appearance in “Absolutely Sweet Marie” may have simply been part of a package of combined lines he’d picked up in a collection of English poetry, and Dylan probably didn’t know that Tennyson and Khayyám’s translator Edward FitzGerald had been close friends. It’s also likely that he didn’t know much about FitzGerald’s own brand of recasting other writers’ work for his own purposes, but that streak of recombining has been an important part of Dylan’s writing throughout his career. In this essay, I will unravel that thread, exploring Dylan’s use of Omar Khayyám’s poetry both at the start and in the most recent releases of his career.
FitzGerald’s Translation Takes the English-Speaking World by Storm
Omar Khayyám was born in Persia, now Iran, in 1048 CE. His last name suggests that he or an ancestor had been a tentmaker.[2] He wrote on a broad range of topics, mainly algebra and astronomy, two disciplines whose roots reach deep in Persia. His chosen poetic form was the four-line rubai‘i (plural rubáiyát). Similar in its mediative tone to the Japanese haiku, Omar Khayyám’s rubáiyát exude an attitude of free thinking and a suspicion of authority, not to mention a deep enjoyment of wine. Because of the hedonism and religious heterodoxy they evince, Khayyám’s poems circulated only among friends, and many other poets copied the style and used his name as a pseudonym in order to share their own nonconformist, and possibly heretical, views.[3] For that reason, it is uncertain which of the many quatrains that exist from this time are actually his. Anyone can be just like him, obviously.
The first edition of Edward FitzGerald’s translation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, published in 1859, sold poorly. But once it was discovered by the pre-rafaelites, [4] it became a hugely popular poem, published in four ever-growing editions. For this discussion I will refer to the fourth, which appeared in 1879 and contains 101 quatrains. FitzGerald’s knowledge of Persian was recent so, at best, merely adequate to the task.[5] However, the published result is greater than the sum of its parts: his Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám is every bit his own vision, an idiosyncratic rendering of Omar Khayyám’ original that reflects FitzGerald’s views as influenced by and contrary to Victorian mores. In this way, FitzGerald’s introduction to the Persian quatrains was as impactful on English poetry as the discovery of Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music was on Dylan’s musical career and the culture as a whole. While each original text or collection – Omar’s and Smith’s carried its own artistic merit, the subsequent translations far exceeded the originals’ ability to reach and speak to new audiences.
Perhaps the best known of the rubáiyát is XII, in which the poet espouses the joys of simple, earthly pleasures:
A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness—
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow![6]
Here Khayyám, as he does elsewhere, rejects religious rewards as symbolized in “Paradise” for the more immediate rewards of poetry and his beloved’s singing. The “Wilderness” is not the desolate space of scripture, but the uncultivated land beyond the settled habitations.[7] Its collection of images – a book of poetry; simple, symbolic sustenance; a song let loose on the landscape – provide details for a number of Dylan’s songs.
Almost as well-known, and more representative of Khayyám’s philosophy, is rubai‘i LXXI. It highlights the carpe diem ideology that suffuses the collection, a reminder that that Bird flies in only one direction:
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.[8]
The written word – or the recorded song – is more lasting than an individual’s life, and the only permanence we can achieve.
By the middle of the twentieth century, though, the popularity of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám was on the wane. It still retained enough recognition that allusions were common, and the rhyming four-line pattern made it attractive for ballad singers. Woody Guthrie first read the Rubáiyát in the 1930s,[9] and wrote in one of his songbooks: “Omar Khayyám seems to have been sorta of a hillbilly hisself, because he took the words right out of my mouth. And he knew how to put down in a very few words just what it takes for a day’s run.”[10] Allusions to FitzGerald can be found in several of Woody’s songs. For example, “Pastures of Plenty,” in keeping with Woody’s idea that Omar Khayyám was a hillbilly like many migrants, features the line “We come with the dust and we go with the wind,”[11] which is an echo of FitzGerald’s line from XXVIII, “I came like water and like wind I go.”[12] In one notebook held in the Woody Guthrie Archives, entitled “Rubyatts” and dated “6-10-43,” he wrote, in precise cursive, sixteen original rubáiyát about labor unions. The poem clearly had a firm hold on him, as he later went on to rewrite more than sixty of FitzGerald’s quatrains in his own Okie voice, recording them with Cisco Houston in about 1947.[13] Except for a short fragment in 1998, these recordings have not been released.
Young Bob Dylan never heard Woody’s Rubáiyát, but there was no avoiding “Pastures of Plenty.” By coincidence, then, the line “I came like water and like wind I go” also echoes in Dylan’s “Song to Woody”:
Here’s to Cisco an’ Sonny an’ Leadbelly too
An’ to all the good people that traveled with you
Here’s to the hearts and the hands of the men
That come with the dust and are gone with the wind.[14]
In this stanza, the connection between FitzGerald and Khayyám extends through Woody and on to Dylan, who reshapes the line to encompass not only Woody’s musical collaborators, but all of the poets and workers in this chain. He couldn’t have known about the Rubáiyát tapes at the time, so his inclusion of Cisco here is serendipitous. It is the clue, the first end of a thread that ties, much like a tentmaker’s material, the earliest elements of his body of work to those of the present day.
Dylan picked up the other end of that thread in 2012 when he released Tempest. Much was made of the similarity of Dylan’s title to Shakespeare’s farewell to the stage, The Tempest. Dylan downplayed that association, pedantically asserting, “Shakespeare’s last play was called The Tempest. It wasn’t called just plain Tempest. The name of my record is just plain Tempest. It’s two different titles.”[15] Indeed, the album, as did “Absolutely Sweet Marie” on a smaller scale, alludes to far more than Shakespeare, making liberal use of classical, biblical, and cinematic references, most notably in the epic song “Tempest,” which uses the film Titanic as much as it does the legend and lore of the great ship itself.
But Omar Khayyám makes a brief appearance in that song too. In the forty-second stanza of the titanic ballad, the phrase “the loveliest and the best,”[16] used to describe the extraordinary number of victims who went down with the ship, is an allusion to ruba‘i XXII:
For some we loved, the loveliest and the best
That from his Vintage rolling Time hath prest,
Have drunk their Cup a round or two before,
And one by one crept silently to rest.[17]
Dylan makes the same “best/rest” rhyme, condensing Khayyám’s quatrain into its most salient image, while retaining the meditation on death. The previous stanza incorporates the “cup” image as well, filling the captain’s with tears. It’s likely that Dylan would have consulted Lord’s classic description of the sinking of the maritime disaster, A Night to Remember, and so would have known that the great ship went down carrying a hand made, jewel-encrusted copy of the Rubáiyát that was auctioned in 1912 for £405, or, in today’s dollars, about $58,000.[18]
In “Narrow Way,” though, Dylan makes the most use of the Rubáiyát. But instead of harping on the carpe diem aspects of FitzGerald’s collection, he instead follows the mordant truths of humanity’s descent into death. The pastoral joys of ruba‘i XII are cruelly cast aside:
You went and lost your lovely head
For a drink of wine and a crust of bread[19]
Instead, he reminds us of the futility of enjoying oneself by quoting ruba‘i LXXI:
Been dark all night, but now it’s dawn
The moving finger is moving on.[20]
All around him, the imagery of enemies and emptiness, not Omar’s convivial wine and gardens, are in control.
In FitzGerald’s ordering of the stanzas, there is a run of quatrains from XXV to XL in which the speaker makes an arcane metaphor that describes the cycle of the body’s corruption back into clay, which is then used by a potter to make cups that miraculously retain a person’s consciousness. In XXXV, the reincarnated cup tells the narrator to “Drink—for once dead, you never shall return.”[21] In XXXVII, he hears another cup in the process of being made ask the potter to work “Gently, Brother, gently, pray!”[22] And in XL, the narrator warns us all to live devoutly, until “Heaven / to Earth invert you—Like an empty Cup.”[23] Each of these show up in “Narrow Way,” though transformed for his own use, much as FitzGerald did with Khayyám’s original. For example, the entirety of the cycle appears in the second stanza, starting with a phrase from ruba‘i XL:
I saw you drinking from an empty cup
I saw you buried and I saw you dug up.[24]
Omar’s exhortation to drink because we cannot return as ourselves from death is changed to “We’ve been to the West and we going back again,”[25] where “West” is in fact the land of the dead, a land from whence the narrator has somehow escaped, but to which he – and we – shall return. To reinforce the idea, in the same stanza, Dylan uses the voice of the incipient cup: “Be gentle brother, be gentle and pray,” but instead of using “pray” in FitzGerald’s sense, as a synonym for “please,” Dylan turns it into a verb, an act of the desperation that inhabits the song like a ghost.
Of course, Tempest wasn’t Dylan’s farewell to his craft. After eight years and three cover albums, 2020’s Rough and Rowdy Ways appeared. As with many other Dylan albums, Rough and Rowdy Ways encompasses a number of influences, all woven together into a unified whole. The last song, “Murder Most Foul,” undeniably named for a Shakespearean line, ostensibly retells the story of the Kennedy assassination, but is also a catalog of songs, many of which appear again in Dylan’s recent book, The Philosophy of Modern Song. The similarity in references suggests that in the intervening time from Tempest, Dylan’s interests have drifted away from films, biblical allusions, and classical poetry. In fact, in The Philosophy of Modern Song, he even seems to reject Khayyám, writing, “While Ivy League graduates talk about love in a rush of quatrains detailing abstract qualities and gossamer attributes, folks from Trinidad to Atlanta, Georgia, sing of the benefits of making an ugly woman your wife and the cold hard facts of life.”[26] Despite the protestations, though, the fact that he even mentions the quatrains shows that they are still not very far from his thoughts.
“Crossing the Rubicon” is a song steeped in ancient images, much as the Rubicon itself is steeped in iron deposits that provide its reddish hue and name. Throughout the song, Dylan scatters a number of images, such as cups and a concern with time and fate, that might be common with Khayyám, or simply common. But the start of the second of the four line stanzas entwines with The Rubáiyát:
The Rubicon is the Red River, going gently as she flows
Redder than your ruby lips and the blood that flows from the rose.[27]
The meditation on the color red, the literal name of the river, continues through the use of “ruby” and “blood” and “rose.” Similarly, ruba’i XIX is also a discourse on rubicundity, with all of the same images:
I sometimes think that never blows so red
The Rose as where some buried Caesar bled.[28]
FitzGerald’s tying together of “Rose,” and “Caesar bled” is pulled taut by Dylan’s single “Rubicon,” which contains within it Caesar’s resolve and bloody death.
“Goodbye Jimmy Reed,” is, like “Song to Woody,” an homage to a musical hero, but it also depicts Dylan’s true religion to be music itself. Indeed, the blues singer addressed throughout seems to be more of a stand-in for music in general, just as “Murder Most Foul” braids history and music. The first stanza announces through many images, including a single line that brings all three Mosaic religions together as one. The confluence of music and religion, an age-old pair, courses through the rest of the song. When Dylan sings, “Give me that old time religion, it’s just what I need,” he doesn’t mean scripture, he means song. That’s why, among the great religions he names, he also allows in the voice of the agnostic tentmaker.
Works Cited
Aleahmad, Mana. “The Effect of Ideology on the Form and Content of Edward FitzGerald’s
Translation of Khayyam’s Rubaiyat.” Linglit Journal, Vol. 2, No. 2, 24 June 2021. DOI:
https://doi.org/10.33258/linglit.v2i2.461. Accessed 11 Sept. 2022.
Browne, Edward G. A Literary History of Persia, Vol. 2 of 4. Cambridge UP. 1956.
Cadbury, William. “Fitzgerald’s Rubáiyát as a Poem.” ELH, Dec., 1967, Vol. 34, No. 4
(Dec., 1967), pp. 541-563. JSTOR. Accessed 25 Oct. 2022.
Decker, Christopher. ed. Edward FitzGerald: Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám,
A Critical Edition. UVAP, 1997.
D’Ambrosio, Vinnie-Marie. Eliot Possessed: T.S. Eliot and Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat. NYUP. 1991.
Dylan, Bob. “Absolutely Sweet Marie.” Blonde on Blonde. 1965. Columbia. Compact disc.
—-. “Crossing the Rubicon.” Rough and Rowdy Ways. 2020. Sony. Compact disc.
—-. “Desolation Row.” Highway 61 Revisited. 1965. Columbia. Compact disc.
—-. “Goodbye Jimmy Reed.” Rough and Rowdy Ways. 2020. Sony. Compact disc.
—-. “Narrow Way.” Tempest. 2012. Sony. Compact disc.
—-. The Philosophy of Modern Song. Simon and Schuster. 2022.
—-. “Song To Woody.” Bob Dylan. 1962. Columbia. Compact disc.
—-. “Subterranean Homesick Blues” Bringing It all Back Home. 1965. Columbia. Compact Disc.
—-. “Tempest.” Tempest. 2012. Sony. Compact disc.
Guthrie, Woody. “Pastures of Plenty.” Woodyguthrie.org.
https://www.woodyguthrie.org/Lyrics/Pastures_Of_Plenty.htm. Accessed 12 June 2023.
Lord, Walter. A Night to Remember. Bantam, 1955.
Ollman, Barry. Zoom conversation. 22 June 2023.
Place, Jeff. Email to John Radosta. 4 October 2022.
“Lost on Titanic: The Legendary Jeweled Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.” Regency.com.
https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=Regency.c m+https://www.regencyantiquebooks.com/19th-century/omar-khayyam-rubaiyat-titanic/&ie=UTF8&oe=UTF-8. Accessed 12 June 2023.
Ricks, Christopher, ed. T.S. Eliot: Inventions of the March Hare. Harcourt. 1996.
[1] Decker xiv.
[2] FitzGerald 91.
[3] Browne 109.
[4] Sayed-Gohrab 1; Decker xxxiv; D’Ambrosio 48
[5] Aleahmad.
[6]FitzGerald 97.
[7] Cadbury 549.
[8] FitzGerald 106.
[9] Place, Liner notes
[10] Klein 108.
[11] Woodguthrie.org, https://www.woodyguthrie.org/Lyrics/Pastures_Of_Plenty.htm.
[12] Decker 100
[13] A fragment of these recordings can be found on The Asch Recordings, Vol. 3. The complete recordings, which are in no clear order and are all too unpolished to be released, remain in the Smithsonian Folkways archive. I am indebted to Jeff Place for his insights and to the rest of the Folkways team, including Greg Adams, Dave Walker, and Cecilia Peterson for making these tapes available to me.
[14] Bobdylan.com: https://www.bobdylan.com/songs/song-woody/.
[15] Mikel Gilmore, “Bob Dylan on His New Dark Album, ‘Tempest.’ ” Rolling Stone, 1 Aug 2012. http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/bob–dylan–on–his–dark–new–album–tempest–20120801.
[16] Bobdylan.com: https://www.bobdylan.com/songs/tempest/
[17] FitzGerald 99.
[18] Lord xi; Regency.com
[19] Bobdylan.com: https://www.bobdylan.com/songs/narrow-way/
[20] ibid.
[21] FitzGerald 101.
[22] ibid.
[23] ibid.
[24] ibid.
[25] Bobdylan.com: https://www.bobdylan.com/songs/narrow-way/
[26] Dylan, Philosophy, 117.
[27] Bobdylan.com: http://www.bobdylan.com/songs/crossing-the-rubicon/
[28] FitzGerald 98
