Bliss Carman, et al., eds. The World’s Best Poetry. 1904.
Descriptive Poems: I. Personal: Great WritersIn a Copy of Omar Khayyám
James Russell Lowell (18191891)T
Each softly lucent as a rounded moon;
The diver Omar plucked them from their bed,
Fitzgerald strung them on an English thread.
When Contemplation tells her pensive beads
Of mortal thoughts, forever old and new.
Fit for a queen? Why, surely then for you!
Faith’s slender shallop till her footing reel,
Plunge: if you find not peace beneath the whirl,
Groping, you may like Omar grasp a pearl.