Persian Literature, Volume 1, Comprising The Shah Nameh | Page 3

for himself. Occupying the position almost of a court poet, he continued to work for Mahmud, and this son of a Turkish slave became a patron of letters. On February 25, 1010, his work was finished. As poet laureate, he had inserted many a verse in praise of his master. Yet the story goes, that though this master had covenanted for a gold dirhem a line, he sent Firdusi sixty thousand silver ones, which the poet spurned and distributed as largesses and hied him from so ungenerous a master.
It is a pretty tale. Yet some great disappointment must have been his lot, for a lampoon which he wrote a short time afterwards is filled with the bitterest satire upon the prince whose praises he had sung so beautifully. Happily, the satire does not seem to have gotten under the eyes of Mahmud; it was bought off by a friend, for one thousand dirhems a verse. But Firdusi was a wanderer; we find him in Herat, in Taberist��n, and then at the Buyide Court of Bagdad, where he composed his "Yusuf and Salikha," a poem as Mohammedan in spirit as the "Sh��h N��meh" was Persian. In 1021, or 1025, he returned to Tus to die, and to be buried in his own garden--because his mind had not been orthodox enough that his body should rest in sacred ground. At the last moment--the story takes up again--Mahmud repented and sent the poet the coveted gold. The gold arrived at one gate while Firdusi's body was being carried by at another; and it was spent by his daughter in the building of a hospice near the city. For the sake of Mahmud let us try to believe the tale.
We know much about the genesis of this great epic, the "Sh��h N��meh"; far more than we know about the make-up of the other great epics in the world's literature. Firdusi worked from written materials; but he produced no mere labored mosaic. Into it all he has breathed a spirit of freshness and vividness: whether it be the romance of Alexander the Great and the exploits of Rustem, or the love scenes of Z��l and Rodhale, of Bezhan and Manezhe, of Gusht��sp and Kitayim. That he was also an excellent lyric poet, Firdusi shows in the beautiful elegy upon the death of his only son; a curious intermingling of his personal woes with the history of his heroes. A cheerful vigor runs through it all. He praises the delights of wine-drinking, and does not despise the comforts which money can procure. In his descriptive parts, in his scenes of battle and encounters, he is not often led into the delirium of extravagance. Sober-minded and free from all fanaticism, he leans not too much to Zoroaster or to Mohammed, though his desire to idealize his Ir��nian heroes leads him to excuse their faith to his readers. And so these fifty or more thousand verses, written in the Arabic heroic Mutakarib metre, have remained the delight of the Persians down to this very day--when the glories of the land have almost altogether departed and Mahmud himself is all forgotten of his descendants.
Firdusi introduces us to the greatness of Mahmud of Ghazna's court. Omar Khayy��m takes us into its ruins; for one of the friends of his boyhood days was Nizam al-Mulk, the grandson of that Toghrul the Turk, who with his Seljuks had supplanted the Persian power. Omar's other friend was Ibn Sabbah, the "old Man of the Mountain," the founder of the Assassins. The doings of both worked misery upon Christian Europe, and entailed a tremendous loss of life during the Crusades. As a sweet revenge, that same Europe has taken the first of the trio to its bosom, and has made of Omar Khayy��m a household friend. "My tomb shall be in a spot where the north wind may scatter roses" is said to have been one of Omar's last wishes. He little thought that those very roses from the tomb in which he was laid to rest in 1123 would, in the nineteenth century, grace the spot where his greatest modern interpreter--Fitzgerald--lies buried in the little English town of Woodbridge!
The author of the famous Quatrains--Omar Ibn Ibrahim al-Khayy��m--not himself a tent-maker, but so-called, as are the Smiths of our own day--was of the city of N��shap��r. The invention of the Rub��iy��t, or Epigram, is not to his credit. That honor belongs to Abu Said of Khorasan (968-1049), who used it as a means of expressing his mystic pantheism. But there is an Omar Khayy��m club in London--not one bearing the name of Abu Said. What is the bond which binds the Rub��iy��t-maker in far-off Persia to the literati of modern Anglo-Saxondom?
By his own people Omar was persecuted for his want of orthodoxy; and yet