The Rubaiyat : Quatrain VII
Come, fill the Cup, and in the Fire of Spring
The Winter Garment of Repentance fling:
The Bird of Time has but a little way
To fly - and Lo! and Bird is on the Wing
This is the seventh quatrain of my continuing series on "The Rubaiyat". As with underlying theme of the previous quatrains this one also touches on time and passing of time. The first two lines say "fill the cup" of life or wine in this ever-pleasing warmth of spring. Throw away the gloom and despair and remorse of the winter and snow where the life comes to a halt. The spring has arrived and enjoy and bask in its glory. The change of weather is just one way to look at it. The changes in seasons depict the stages in one's life wherein a phase of dullness and sorrow is soon eclipsed by something pleasurable and mirth and cycle of joy and grief continues. Enjoy this moment. Live it full! for the wheels will turn soon. Nothing is perpetual, neither this time nor this joy. Only the change is constant. The next two lines tells that his moment is temporal, this phase is fleeting. The time will be on move again for it waits for none. Appreciate the beauty of the moment. Relish it for it will be gone for ever. The Bird of Time is on its wings again!
Thoreau - Walden Quotes - II
This is the second post on the best quotes from Thoreau' s Walden as I continue reading through the book. Read more posts on Thoreau's Walden.
I read in the Gulistan, or Flower Garden, of Sheik Sadi of Shiraz, that “they asked a wise man, saying: Of the many celebrated trees which the Most High God has created lofty and umbrageous, they call none azad, or free, excepting the cypress, which bears no fruit; what mystery is there in this? He replied: Each has its appropriate produce, and appointed season, during the continuance of which it is fresh and blooming, and during their absence dry and withered; to neither of which states is the cypress exposed, being always flourishing; and of this nature are the azads, or religious independents.— Fix not thy heart on that which is transitory; for the Dijlah, or Tigris, will continue to flow through Bagdad after the race of caliphs is extinct: if thy hand has plenty, be liberal as the date tree; but if it affords nothing to give away, be an azad, or free man, like the cypress.”
I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.
Every man has to learn the points of compass again as often as be awakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction. Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.
A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature. The fluviatile trees next the shore are the slender eyelashes which fringe it, and the wooded hills and cliffs around are its overhanging brows.
Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant’s truce between virtue and vice. Goodness is the only investment that never fails. In the music of the harp which trembles round the world it is the insisting on this which thrills us. The harp is the travelling patterer for the Universe’s Insurance Company, recommending its laws, and our little goodness is all the assessment that we pay. Though the youth at last grows indifferent, the laws of the universe are not indifferent, but are forever on the side of the most sensitive. Listen to every zephyr for some reproof, for it is surely there, and he is unfortunate who does not hear it. We cannot touch a string or move a stop but the charming moral transfixes us. Many an irksome noise, go a long way off, is heard as music, a proud, sweet satire on the meanness of our lives.
Every man is the builder of a temple, called his body, to the god he worships, after a style purely his own, nor can he get off by hammering marble instead. We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones. Any nobleness begins at once to refine a man’s features, any meanness or sensuality to imbrute them.
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