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

He had been working at it
steadily since 971, but had not yet rounded it out according to the
standard which he had set 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 Taberistán,
and then at the Buyide Court of Bagdad, where he composed his
"Yusuf and Salikha," a poem as Mohammedan in spirit as the "Sháh
Námeh" 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 "Sháh Námeh";
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 Zál and Rodhale,
of Bezhan and Manezhe, of Gushtásp 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 Iránian
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 Khayyám 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 Khayyám 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-Khayyám--not himself a tent-maker, but so-called, as are the Smiths
of our own day--was of the city of Níshapúr. The invention of the
Rubáiyát, 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 Khayyám club in London--not
one bearing the name of Abu Said. What is the bond