routledge+history+of+literature+in+english

328 The nineteenth century
also saw the publication of a poem which was to become one of the
most popular and widely read of any age – Edward Fitzgerald’s translation
of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. A very free version of a twelfthcentury
Persian poet, it catches an escapist, irresponsible mood which
might seem at odds with the seriousness of the time. But, in echoing
the Renaissance preoccupation with the fleeting nature of time and the
transience of human glory, Fitzgerald’s injunction to seize the moment
gives almost the only purely sensual enjoyment in mid-Victorian verse,
and a suitable antidote to Tennyson’s dominant tone of resignation.
Ah, my Beloved, fill the Cup that clears
Today of past Regrets and future Fears:
Tomorrow? – Why, Tomorrow I may be
Myself with Yesterday’s Sev’n thousand years.
. . .
Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend,
Before we too into the Dust descend;
Dust into Dust, and under Dust, to lie,
Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer, and – sans End!
The wit of Browning is matched in some of the irreverent writings
of Arthur Hugh Clough, who has been described as having ‘the
sympathetic modern accent’. The tone which might find most modern
approval is in his The Latest Decalogue (published posthumously in
1862), a satirical rewriting of the biblical Ten Commandments:
Thou shalt have one God only; who
Would be at the expense of two?
Similarly,
There is no God, the wicked saith,
And truly it’s a blessing . . .
And almost everyone when age,
Disease, or sorrows strike him,
Inclines to think there is a God,
Or something very like him.