PART I:

Awake, for morning in the bowl of night
Has flung the stone which puts the stars to flight,
And lo! The hunter of the east has caught
The Sultan's turret in a noose of light.

Dreaming, when dawn's left hand was in the sky,
I heard a voice within the tavern cry:
Awake, my little ones, and fill the cup,
Before life's liquor in its cup be dry.

Now the new year reviving old desires,
The thoughtful soul to solitude retires,
And the white hand of Moses on the bough
Puts out and Jesus from the ground suspires.

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! The bird is on the wing.

Look! A thousand blossoms with the day
Woke—and still a thousand scattered into clay,
And this first summer month that brings the rose
Shall take Jamshyyd and Kaikobad away.

With me along some strip of herbage strown
That just divides the desert from the sown;
Where name of slave and Sultan scarce is known,
And pity Sultan Mahmoud on his throne.

Here with a loaf of bread beneath the bough,
A flask of wine, a book of verse, and thou
Beside me singing in the wilderness,
And wilderness is paradise enow.

PART II:

How sweet is mortal sovereignty, think some;
Others, how blest the paradise to come.
Ah, take the cash in hand and waive the rest,
Oh the brave music of a distant drum!

The worldly hope men set their hearts upon
Turns ashes, or it prospers—and anon,
Like snow upon the desert's dusty face
Lighting a little hour or two, is gone.

Ah, my beloved, fill the cup that clears
Today of past regrets and future fears.
Tomorrow? Why, tomorrow I may be
Myself with yesterday's seven thousand years.

Why, all the saints and sages who discussed
Of the two worlds so learnedly are thrust
Like foolish prophets forth, their words to scorn,
Are scattered, and their mouths are stopped with dust.

PART III:

There was a door to which I found no key,
There was a veil through which I could not see:
Some little talk awhile of thee and me
There seemed—and then no more of thee and me.

Then to the rolling heaven itself I cried,
Asking—What lamp has destiny to guide
Her little children stumbling in the dark?
And—A blind understanding, heaven replied.

Then to this earth bowl did I adjourn
My lip, the secret well of life to learn.
And, lip to lip, it murmured: While you live,
Drink, for once dead, you never shall return.

For in the marketplace on dusk of day,
I watched the potter thumping his wet clay.
And with its all obliterated tongue,
It murmured: Gently, brother, gently, pray.

Ah, fill the cup, what boots it to repeat,
How time is slipping underneath our feet—
Unborn tomorrow and dead yesterday,
Why fret about them if today be sweet?

One moment in annihilation's waste,
One moment of the well of life to taste.
The stars are setting and the caravan
Starts for the dawn of nothing—oh, make haste!

But the wise to wrangle—and with me
The quarrel of the universe let be.
And in the corner of the hubbub coucht,
Make game of that which makes as much of thee.

For in and out, above, about, below,
'Tis nothing but a magic shadow show
Played in a box whose candle is the sun,
Round which we phantom figures come and go.

And if the wine you drink, the lip you press
End in the nothing all things end in—yes—
Then fancy while thou art, thou art but what
Thou shalt be—Nothing; thou shalt not be less.

PART IV:

The moving finger writes, and having writ
Moves on; nor all thy piety nor wit
Shall it lure it back to cancel half a line,
Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.

With earth's first clay they did the last man's knead,
And then of the last harvest sow the seed.
Yea, the first morning of creation wrote
What the last dawn of reckoning shall read.

Oh thou, who man of baser earth didst make,
And who, with Eden, didst devise the snake:
For all the sin wherewith the face of man
Is blackened—man's forgiveness give—and take.

Alas that spring should vanish with the rose,
That youth's sweet manuscript should close.
The nightingale that in the branches sang—
Ah, whence, and whither flown again, who knows?