Rediscovering old pleasures

I was just watching a very inspiring program about Omar Khayyam on BBC4 tonight and rediscovered an old "friend". 

I have many times read Khayyam's poetry, in the famously translated version to English by Edward FitzGerald. However, I have had the same relationship with Khayyam's poetry as I had with Shakespear when I studied for my English degree - their language is not easy to grasp. But then I discovered the clue for me to uncovering them - have the poetry recited TO you! I used to borrow tapes from the library with Shakespear's plays, and suddenly they all made sense! I think perhaps much poetry is that way - it has to be recited with emotion, not just read.

With their concern for the here and now, as opposed to the hereafter, Khayyam's quatrains are as romantic today as they were hundreds of years ago. They are a tribute to the power of one moment's pleasure over a lifetime of sorrow, of desire over the viscissitudes of time.

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.