"The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam"

In Verse 23, the speaker of “The Rubaiyat” advises the reader to make the most of their time, “Before we too into the Dust Descend; / Dust into Dust, and under Dust, to lie, / Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer and—sans End!” (Lines 90-92). The carpe-diem (seize the day/live for the now) guidance of the verse is all-too familiar and dates all the way back to ancient Roman poet Horace; however, it is not the real point of the epigrammatic verse. The actual revelation of the verse is not that humans return to death, ashes to ashes and dust to dust, but that they lie in this dust without wine, song, singing, or even an end. In other words, there is no afterlife, no glory, no voices from the beyond, just the radio silence of death.

The verse captures an essential theme of “The Rubaiyat,” which would have been heretical in its time and for many successive centuries; in the contemporary era it continues to be discomfiting for many. The finality of death implies that life may be meaningless, which is a question “The Rubaiyat” brings up again and again, but most strikingly in the

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