October 06, 2026

Awake To Beauty

Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight: And Lo! the Hunter of the East has caught The Sultan's Turret in a Noose of Light.

Omar Khayyam was an eleventh-century Persian astronomer and mathematician in Nishapur who also wrote quatrains on wine, time, and the fleeting beauty of the world. Edward FitzGerald's nineteenth-century translation opens with this image of dawn breaking over a sultan's city, the sun striking its highest tower before the rest of the world wakes. It is the first thing the poem shows us: light arriving uninvited, turning stone to gold for a moment before the day's business begins. Centuries later it still works as a plain reminder that beauty often shows up first, before anything else has happened.