Paradise enow

Several comments on my yesterday's blip mentioned the lines of poetry I included. It was of course one of the quatrains from as translated by the Victorian poet Edward FitzGerald.

Fitzgerald's rendering of the selection of 11/12th century Persian verses was extremely free and coloured by his own sceptism about the value of religious belief. (He showed a proselytizing vicar the door with the words "Sir, you might have conceived that a man does not come to my years of life without thinking much of these things. I believe I may say that I have reflected [on] them fully as much as yourself. You need not repeat this visit.") The poem dwells upon mortality, the transience of everything and the futility of any attempt to hold back time.

Although there have been innumerable subsequent translations of the verses, and the poem has been translated into just about every language under the sun, FitzGerald's version caught the popular imagination like no other. His quatrains have been so heavily quoted and borrowed for titles that they may well seem familiar even to those for whom their provenance is unknown.

Here's my attempt to depict one of the most famous verses:

A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread--and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness--
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!

My garden makes a good stand-in for a wilderness although I'm not sure how paradisal would be Casey's singing.