Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

The quatrains of Omar Khayyam, the Persian astronomer-poet, in Edward FitzGerald's famous English rendering — here in the fourth edition of 1879, the version FitzGerald himself settled. Wine and roses, the moving finger, and the brief span of life: the Rubaiyat became one of the most loved poem-sequences in the English language, carrying readers from Persian poetry into English verse by the oldest bridge between them.