10 h 2 minAudiobook8 minSummaryRead it, hear it, the 15-minute summary, and print and large print at costPaperback · 6 × 9 in · printing soonHardcover · 6 × 9 in · printing soonAbout this book
What if the wine cup holds a question about eternity?
The Sufistic Quatrains of Omar Khayyam gathers four-line poems attributed to the Persian mathematician, astronomer and poet. Each holds a single thought, inviting you to pause rather than hurry onward. Across poems on wine, passing time and doubt, the speaker asks what life offers when pleasure fades and death remains.
This collection reads the quatrains through the Sufi tradition, the mystical current of Islam that seeks union with the divine. In that reading, the cup, the cupbearer and the tavern become signs of spiritual longing. Roses fade, kings leave dust behind, and caravans move on: concrete images open questions about mortality, faith and the hope of something beyond.
What you’ll discover
- Four lines, one thought Discover short poems that give a single thought room to linger.
- Wine and spiritual longing Explore how a Sufi reading finds longing for the divine in the cup and tavern.
- Time you can see Meet fading roses and passing caravans that bring life's brevity close.
- Questions without easy comfort Follow a speaker who asks about our origins, our destination and the pain of living.
- Pleasure beside eternity Sit with poems that place earthly pleasure beside the hope of something beyond.
Who will love it
You will love this if you enjoy poems about wine, gardens and the passing of time, or if you like seeing how one poet's lines grow out of older Persian verses and the debates around them.
What’s inside
The key ideas, in the 15-minute summary
- Morning opens the poem with a call to wake
- Kings and heroes fade, and roses remain
- Take the cash in hand today
- Wise teachers cannot solve the central riddle
- The grape answers where reason falls silent
- Life is a shadow show moved by fate
- The poet argues with the maker himself
- Repentance fades and the poem turns to farewell
- Behind the poem stand Persian sources and scholars
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- Large print hardcover
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Las cuartetas sufíes de Omar Jayyam
by Omar Jayyam
A tavern voice at dawn tells Omar Khayyam's readers to fill the cup before life runs dry.
Medium level10–20 hours to read25 languages
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In short
Why does a poem tell you to wake at dawn and fill your cup? In The Sufistic Quatrains of Omar Khayyam, a Persian poet of the eleventh century speaks through four-line verses.
From the 15-minute summary · Key idea 1
Morning opens the poem with a call to wake
The poem begins at dawn. Morning throws a stone into the bowl of night, the stars run away, and the Hunter of the East catches the Sultan's turret in a noose of light. The speaker wants you up and moving.
Then comes a dream. A voice inside a tavern tells its little ones to fill the cup before the liquor of life dries up. At cockcrow a crowd outside shouts for the door to open, because they know how little time they have to stay and that no one who leaves comes back. The new year stirs old desires, and Moses and Jesus appear as signs of spring on the bough and in the ground.
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What is The Sufistic Quatrains of Omar Khayyam about?
It gathers four-line poems on the shortness of life, wine, roses, fate and the silence of heaven. The verses move between delight in the present and questions about what lies beyond it.
Who was Omar Khayyam?
He is a Persian poet and scholar. According to the tale told by Nicolas, he studied at Nishapur with two friends, Nizam-el-Moulk and Hassan-Sebbah, and chose a quiet life of poetry.
What does the wine mean in the quatrains?
Some readers take it as plain pleasure. Sufi readers take it as divine love. Whinfield finds both worldly pleasure and mystical devotion in the verses. The poem keeps both meanings alive.
The author
Omar Khayyam
1048–1131 · Persian mathematician and poet
Omar Khayyam (1048–1131) was a Persian mathematician, astronomer, and poet. He was born and died in Nishapur, in present-day Iran, and also worked in Samarkand and Isfahan. He wrote about algebra in the eleventh century and helped reform the Persian calendar. Quatrains attributed to him were later collected as the Rubaiyat.
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