Contents -Volume INDEX -AUTHOR INDEX -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

Stedman and Hutchinson, comps. A Library of American Literature:
An Anthology in Eleven Volumes. 1891.
Vols. IX–XI: Literature of the Republic, Part IV., 1861–1889

Omar Khayyám

By Frank Dempster Sherman (1860–1916)

AT Naishápúr his ashes lie

O’ershadowed by the mosque’s blue dome;

There folded in his tent of sky

The star of Persia sleeps at home.

The Rose her buried Nightingale

Remembers, faithful all these years;

Around his grave the winds exhale

The fragrant sorrow of her tears.

Sultans and Slaves in caravans

Since Malik Shah have gone their way,

And ridges in the Kubberstans

Are their memorials to-day.

But from the dust in Omar’s tomb

A Fakir has revived a Rose,—

Perchance the old, ancestral bloom

Of that one by the mosque which blows.

Out of its petals he has caught

The inspiration Omar knew,

Who from the stars his wisdom brought,

A Persian Rose that drank the dew.

The Fakir now in dust lies low

With Omar of the Orient;

Fitzgerald,—shall we call him? No;

’Twas Omar in the Occident!