Meaning of rubaiyat of oman khayyam

Posted by Smokey Stover on January 23, 2007

In Reply to: Meaning of rubaiyat of oman khayyam posted by Bob on January 23, 2007

: : meaning of rubaiyat of oman khayyam

: Surely you can't mean the whole poem. Which particular phrases are you having trouble with?

In Persian poetry, a rubaʽi is a quatrain. The plural, Ŕubaʽiyat, means collection of quatrains. Omar Khayyam was a Persian poet, astronomer and mathematician of the 11th and 12th centuries who, among many other interesting achievements, devised a calendar more accurate than the Gregorian Calendar, the one used in the West (and by us). Edward Fitzgerald translated, somewhat freely, various quatrains by Khayyam into English in iambic pentameter, with the rhyme scheme aaba.
SS