My Rubaiyat

I will drop the mask and tell you the secret of my verses. You say they impress you as being uneven and unfinished. I heartily agree with you. As I have stated in my announcement to the public, a poem of the scope and range of “My Rubaiyat” is never complete. No doubt, it will undergo many changes within the next ten years. I say ten years deliberately. You see, I possess the arrogance of conviction. I believe it will survive, simply because it strikes a popular chord, and attempts, no matter how vaguely, to reproduce a broken melody that hums in every mind. Somebody else may venture forth on similar paths and succeed to please even the fastidious in rhyme. “My Rubaiyat” may be put on the back shelves. Well, we will see. I look at my work with objective eyes. It is a mere youngster now. It will grow and nobody will watch its growth with keener appreciation than I myself. The number of verses will not increase, but I sincerely hope that they will gain in clarity and strength as well as in musical and pictorial wealth of expression.

As for versification, let me make this explanation. I chose the eight syllable stanza on account of its terseness of expression. It is least pliable to any rush and swing of rhythm, but most conducive to the conveyance of fragmentary moods and thoughts. The omission of rhyme I essayed for no other reason than its technical difficulty. To make rhymeless lines read like a poem is the most laborious task a songsmith can set himself. It is the vanity of the alien to show his mastery over a language that was neither his father’s nor his mother’s tongue. But I object to your statement that I disdain rhythm. I have a vague suspicion that you really mean meter. My meter is rough and wilful and subject to impurities, as for instance counting the last two syllables in words like “happier” and “sunnier” either as one or two, just as my fancy, or rather my appreciation of rhythm, dictates. My rhythm changes constantly but it is palpable, underneath as it were, at all times. I have some experience as a reader (though elocutionists may shrug their shoulders at my style of interpretation—let them shrug) and I have, whenever I write, the habit of reading aloud the words as I put them down. Reading means to get a certain sense and swing, color and sound in the words as one utters them. If my verses contain this possibility of aural gratification they cannot be utterly devoid of rhythm. No doubt my sense of sound alliteration is foreign, unconsciously Oriental. I feel a sound relation, no, even a rhyme suggestion in words like “chance” and “spring,” “herd” and “feet” at the end of succeeding stanzas. The alliteration of Japanese poets is much subtler (due to the peculiarities of the language) than the word music of our Laniers and Whitmans, although it is never conducted with the elaborate precision of a Poe or Swinburne. It always remains fragmentary, it rarely resembles full orchestration. Also my lines lack the merit of contrapuntal structure. Yet they have one quality which is generally overlooked. They possess pictorial harmony. My long and persistent association with art makes me not only see but think things in pictures. Pictures abound throughout “My Rubaiyat” for all who have the mental pictorial vision to see them. Lines like “turn phantoms with the colder morn” and “in a hilltown among roses” are as concentrated as any image that can be found in a tanka (i.e. Japanese short poem).

Critics may contend that pictorial suggestion per se, as the main characteristic of a poem, does not conform to the accepted forms of poetry. This objection is meaningless to me. Without the spirit of innovation there would have been no incentive to write the poem. Like the composers of the day I believe in the old ideals but in new methods of expression.

My ambition was to write a simple poem which would appeal to all; to chambermaids as well as cognoscenti, ordinary business men as well as solitary artistic souls. Who will decide whether I have succeeded or failed? Only the public at large. The poem, no doubt, is too didactic for fragile aesthetics who glorify naught but evanescent words, but it is surely no shortcoming to try to express thought. Even exponents of the modern schools attempt this—occasionally. The way of expression is a different matter. It is open to criticism. But excuses that a critic knows nothing about a certain subject, and yet at the same time deliberate pricks at this very thorn in the flesh of his ignorance are sad to contemplate. Rhyme is surely out of date. And the supposed lack of rhythm is merely imaginary. Would you enjoy Japanese or Chinese music? Very likely not and yet they contain as fine a rhythm and as musical a quality as any modern composition. Only they are vaguer, subtle, different.

And on this difference hinges all logical and evasive argument. The practical philosophy contained in “My Rubaiyat,” of course, can be attacked for being non-moral or non-religious, but the technique of the poem can be discussed only from one viewpoint.