Every year I have had a conversation about poetry, mainly in my literature classes. I have never been a fan of poetry but slowly I have been able to appreciate it more. I actually realized that I generally say that I’m not into poetry but in fact, one of my favorite books is about the poems of the Rubaiyat by Omar Khayam. They are the core of the story written by Amin Maalouf in  Samarcande. The book starts with when the manuscript of the Rubaiyat disappears into the sea after the wreck of the Titanic. “At the bottom of the Atlantic, there is a book. I am going to tell you its history. When the Titanic went down its most eminent victim was a book, the only copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam the Persian sage, poet, and astronomer”.

Omar Khayyam was one of the most famous poets of Persian but also a mathematician and a scientist of the 11th-century.  His poetry is very unique and has stood the test of time. In the late 19th century he became increasingly popular among Europe’s erudite and nowadays his poems can be read in many different languages. For his time, Khayam defied and questioned things such as faith and the meaning of life. Thoughts that others took for granted. He was only certain about the ephemeral nature of life and that death was inevitable.

Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat is still relevant even 11 centuries after, because of its atemporal nature and universality. Khayyam’s poetry is not very different from the notions of life we have discussed in class, about the precarity of life and vulnerability. 

It does not matter where you were born, what religion you practice, what you believe in, your skin color or nationality, we all value our lives greatly because we all know  (spoiler alert) we are not immortal.  Poetry has the power to reminds us this fact in an often compelling and confusing way. No wonder Plato wanted to ban poets from the Republic. Poetry is powerful and can give voice to those that have been silenced.

Were it not Folly, Spider-like to spin
The Thread of present Life away to win –
What? for ourselves, who know not if we shall
Breathe out the very Breath we now breathe in!

-Omar Khayyam