Wednesday, June 11, 2008

From the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

The Broken Hourglass work made me dig my copy out & give it another read.* It's a lovely Dover Thrift Edition. I've gotten all snobby about editions and annotations & etc lately, but deep down,* I still still adore Dover for putting out all sorts of different classics in nice, cheap, highly portable editions.

Anyway, I still like the first quatrain of the first edition as much as I remembered.

Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night
Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight:
And Lo! the Hunter of the East has caught
The Sultan's Turret in a Noose of Light.



*Partly curiosity partly looking for inspiration for tavern names; exact quotations are out, but I was hoping for ideas.
**Maybe not so very deep down as all that.

No comments:

Post a Comment