Victorian Poetry

KAREN ALKALAY-GUT

design of the angel's cloths than the actions and events that comprise
Guenevere's narrative.
Many of the preoccupations that I have so far identified with aesthetic
poetry - its resistance to high moral seriousness, its nonsymbolic use of
religious iconography, and its fascination with sensual experience - con-
verge in Edward FitzGerald's elegant translation and adaptation of the
Persian Rubdiydt of Omar Khayyam. Published anonymously in 1859,
FitzGerald's volume was soon remaindered, and it might well have suffered
the fate of many other scholarly works had it not been discovered by two of
Rossetti's friends on a London bookstall. (The influence was immediate.
Swinburne's "Laus Veneris" employs the rubdi stanza.) To be sure, there are
many questions about Omar Khayyam's intentions. In some ways, his
poem can be read as an examination of mutability. But one thing is clear.
As a devout Muslim he would not have openly advocated the kinds of
hedonism that Rossetti, Swinburne, and many other English writers found
in his work and developed in their own poetry. The following famous lines
appear in various forms throughout late-nineteenth-century poetry:

Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,

A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse, and Thou

Beside me singing in the Wilderness -

And Wilderness is Paradise enow. 14

Given Omar Khayyam's religious beliefs, he would not have literally
claimed that a "Flask of Wine" was the basis of "Paradise." Indeed, the
poetic formula that we find here - wine, bread, and a beloved object of
affection - probably echoes an atheistic version of Communion. But this
formula became central to British aestheticism. Either in their poems or in
their actual lives, writers belonging to this movement appealed to narcotics

• such as absinthe, chloral hydrate, and wine - as a way of increasing
  sensation while dulling the moral pressures exerted by the everyday world.
  The conclusion of FitzGerald's stanza - "Wilderness is Paradise enow" -
  illustrates how aestheticism sought to substitute sensual fulfillment in the
  form of an artistically created situation for an absolute theological explana-
  tion of the world. True paradise is not alluring but a wilderness that can be
  transformed through artificial means to paradise is far more attractive. It is
  no accident that Darwin's theory of natural selection appeared in the same
  year as FitzGerald's Rubdiydt. Darwin's Origin of Species (1859) destroyed
  the absolute comfort of the Bible, contested the justification of the ways of
  God to humanity, and unsettled the concept of an afterlife. Art for its own
  sake seemed, for the moment, to hold the answer to human endeavor.

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