"How many Kisses might it take:" FitzGerald’s The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám 1:35

"How many Kisses might it take:" FitzGerald’s The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám 1:35

Quatrain no. 35 in the first edition of Edward FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám is a meditation on death and the way that the dead live on in the artefacts of our daily lives. Their emotions were the same as ours, their loves and passions, now faded, were no less ardent than our own. They are now clay, and some of the clay objects, like jugs and cups, in our daily lives, are really just survivals of those people of the past. It is a grim vi…