No. 47
Had I, like God, a hand upon the heavens’ gyre,
I’d lift this heaven out from the midst, entire;
and of myself would build another heaven new,
where the free would gain with ease their heart’s desire.*
Philosophical Reflection
The first two lines set up a supposition and act on it. If I had a hand on the universe as God does, I would lift this universe out entirely. Khayyam does not blame the turning sky itself; elsewhere he lets the sky protest that it is as helpless as we are. Here he looks past the machinery to the hand that holds it. The logic is plain. If that hand exists, and could remove this universe, and the universe remains as it is, then it remains so by choice. And the speaker would not repair it. He would remove it whole, which says that the fault is not in some part of the order but in the order itself.
The last two lines give the new design, and its single criterion: the free would reach their heart’s desire with ease. Not the pious rewarded, not the wicked punished, but the free left unobstructed. The free here are those who are loosed from greed and servitude, and their desires are small. Elsewhere Khayyam names them: a loaf every other day, a sip of cold water from a broken jug, and no master to serve. The fact the poem rests on is one anyone can check against experience: in this world even that little is hard to come by for those who will not bow. The charge, then, is not that the world is imperfect, but that its obstruction falls on those who ask the least of it.
The method is a proof by comparison. A mortal, with nothing but an ordinary sense of what is fair, can conceive a better universe than the one that exists. If he can, then either the present universe is not the best that could be made, or its maker does not intend what a decent person would. The philosophers had a reply, and Khayyam knew it well enough to set it out in his own treatises: a world of coming-to-be and passing-away cannot exist without contraries, evil is the accidental companion of a greater good, and to withhold much good for fear of a little evil would itself be unjust. But that reply answers a different question. It explains why there is some hardship in the world. It does not explain why the hardship should fall on the free, whose needs are the smallest in it, when easing them would cost the cosmos almost nothing. Having laid out the philosophers’ account, Khayyam passes it to the reader’s judgement and does not add his own.
The final message is not a plan for rebuilding the universe. It is a judgement on the one that was built, measured by the simplest standard there is: let those who want little live at ease. By that standard the present universe fails, and the poem says so without anger or argument, only by showing what a single man would have done in its place. If a man can imagine a better world, the question returns to the hand that could have made it.
Footnote
* Source: Tarabkhaneh, Homaei, no. 47, translated by Kam Austine for Philosophy in Verse.
گر بر فلکم دست بدی چون یزدان
برداشتمی من این فلک را ز میان
و از خود فلکی دگر ز نو ساختمی
کآزاده بکام دل رسیدی آسان
Related Treatises: Ḍarūrat al-Taḍādd fī al-Wujūd, Risāla fī al-Kawn wa al-Taklīf (On the World and the Duty)
Internal Themes: #ChallengeWithTheCreator #Determinism #Theodicy #Freedom #Ethics #PersianPhilosophy
Published as part of Philosophy in Verse — The Omar Khayyam Project
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