What Is the Rubaiyat?
Quick answer: The Rubaiyat is a set of Persian quatrains rhymed AABA, most famously Omar Khayyam's in FitzGerald's 1859 version. History, metre, how to write one.
Ask two well-read people what the Rubaiyat is and you may get two different, equally correct answers. In Persian, rubaiyat is simply the plural of ruba'i, a four line poem, so the word names an entire verse form: quatrains that usually rhyme AABA, with the third line left deliberately unrhymed. In English, though, the Rubaiyat almost always means one specific book, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, the sequence of Persian quatrains that Edward FitzGerald translated, rearranged and half reinvented in 1859. Both answers matter, and this page takes them in turn.
The book went on to become one of the most quoted poems of the Victorian age, printed in everything from penny pamphlets to jewelled bindings, memorised, parodied and set to music. The form is older than Khayyam himself and remains a live option for poets now: four lines, a strong turn, a rhyme scheme that withholds and then delivers. To understand the Rubaiyat properly you need a form, a mathematician, a shy Victorian translator and one of the strangest publishing stories in English poetry.
The poem
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
Omar Khayyam, translated by Edward FitzGerald, 'Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam' (1859)
The ruba'i: a quatrain with a held breath
A ruba'i is a complete poem in four lines. The classic rhyme scheme is AABA: lines one, two and four share a rhyme, while line three stands free. That unrhymed third line is the engine of the form. After two rhymed lines have settled the ear into a pattern, the third line breaks it, and the poem seems to inhale. The fourth line then returns to the rhyme and lands the thought, often with the snap of an epigram.
Persian poets used the ruba'i for philosophy, love, mockery and mysticism precisely because it is so compressed. There is no room to develop an argument, only to strike one. A good ruba'i behaves like a chess puzzle: a position, a complication, a single decisive move. Some Persian quatrains rhyme all four lines, AAAA, which is also permitted, but the AABA version, with its held breath, is the one that shaped the tradition.
Omar Khayyam, the reluctant poet
Omar Khayyam was born in Nishapur, in present-day Iran, in 1048, and died there around 1131. In his own lifetime he was famous not as a poet but as a scientist. He wrote a landmark treatise on algebra, classifying and solving cubic equations by geometric methods, and he worked on the reform of the Persian calendar, helping to produce a solar calendar of remarkable accuracy. Poetry, as far as we can tell, was a private sideline.
The quatrains attached to his name are a genuine scholarly puzzle. No manuscript survives from his lifetime, and over the following centuries hundreds of quatrains accreted to his reputation, the way stray jokes get attributed to any famous wit. Scholars still argue about which verses, if any, are authentically his. The honest position is that a core of sceptical, worldly quatrains may go back to Khayyam, while many others were written by later hands and filed under the most convenient famous name.
FitzGerald's beautiful infidelity
Edward FitzGerald was a retiring English gentleman scholar who taught himself Persian and, in 1859, anonymously published a slim pamphlet of 75 quatrains called Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. It sold almost nothing. The publisher eventually dumped copies in a bargain box priced at a penny, where they were discovered by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Algernon Swinburne, who bought copies for friends. Word spread through literary London, and the penny pamphlet grew into a phenomenon.
FitzGerald was open about the freedom of his method. He merged separate quatrains, invented connecting images, dropped verses he disliked and arranged the result into a single day-long meditation, from dawn's call to fill the cup to the fall of night. He revised the poem across five editions, and devoted readers still argue over whether the first or the fifth is the true text. Call it a version rather than a translation and you will offend nobody who knows the history.
What the quatrains actually say
The Rubaiyat's themes are wine, time, fate and doubt. The speaker urges the reader to drink and be present, because yesterday is unrecoverable and tomorrow is not promised. Readers have argued for well over a century about whether the wine is literal or a Sufi symbol for divine intoxication; FitzGerald himself leaned toward the literal reading, while many Persian scholars hear mystical overtones. The poem lets both readings breathe, which is part of its durability.
The most famous stanza in the English version faces fate directly, and it shows the AABA turn working at full power. The unrhymed third line carries the futile hope, and the fourth line closes the door on it.
Frost and the interlocking rubaiyat
The AABA stanza has a hidden gear: the unrhymed third line can seed the rhyme of the next stanza, producing the chain AABA, BBCB, CCDC and so on. This is called the interlocking rubaiyat, and its most celebrated use in English is Robert Frost's poem about stopping by woods on a snowy evening, published in 1923. Each stanza hands its loose rhyme forward, and Frost solves the problem of how to end the chain by rhyming all four lines of the final stanza and repeating his last line outright.
That structural borrowing shows how far the Persian quatrain travelled. A form built for wine songs in eleventh century Nishapur ended up shaping one of the most anthologised American poems of the twentieth century. Forms migrate better than empires do.
Writing your own ruba'i
Start with the rhyme, not the idea. Pick an A sound with plenty of everyday partners (day, light, rain, door) so the fourth line never sounds forced. Then treat the four lines as four jobs: establish, deepen, swerve, land. The third line should genuinely change direction, introducing a doubt, an image from elsewhere, a question. The fourth line answers the swerve and the rhyme at once, which is why a strong ruba'i feels inevitable.
Here is an original example of the shape at work: The kettle sings, the winter light goes thin, / the day I planned dissolves before I begin; / somewhere a door I never opened waits, / and still I sit, and pour the evening in. Notice how the unrhymed third line opens a small ache, and the return of the rhyme closes it. If you enjoy the click of that closure, write a dozen. The form teaches economy faster than any exercise we know, and economy is exactly what contest judges reward when they score structure and language.
What poets can take from this
- Keep the third line of a ruba'i unrhymed and let it carry the poem's twist.
- Choose rhyme sounds with many common partners so the final line lands naturally.
- Read FitzGerald's first and fifth editions side by side to watch a master revise.
- Try the interlocking chain, letting each stanza's third line set the next stanza's rhyme.
- Treat every quatrain as a complete poem: one image, one pressure, one release.
- If you write a sequence, give it a single governing frame, as FitzGerald gave his one day from dawn to dark.
Try it yourself
Write four interlocking quatrains (AABA, BBCB, CCDC, DDDD) that follow one ordinary object, a cup, a coin or a key, from morning to night, letting the final stanza rhyme all four lines to close the chain.
Questions
Did Omar Khayyam really write the Rubaiyat?
Nobody knows for certain. No manuscript survives from his lifetime, and hundreds of quatrains were attributed to him over the centuries. Scholars generally accept that a core of sceptical quatrains may be his, while many others were added later under his famous name.
Is FitzGerald's translation accurate?
It is famously free. FitzGerald merged quatrains, invented images and arranged the poems into a day-long sequence of his own design. Most scholars call it a version or recreation rather than a translation, and it stands as an English poem in its own right.
How do you pronounce rubaiyat?
A close approximation is roo-bye-YAT, with the stress at the end. The singular, ruba'i, is roughly roo-BAH-ee. English speakers vary, and no reasonable reader will mind either common pronunciation.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated September 2026.
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