COVE

Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám Astronomer Poet of Persia is a fascinating edition in the long history of Rubáiyát  gift books. This edition features many Art Nouveau illustrations that resemble, and don't, themes in the text. This edition is illustrated by Florence Lundborg, a San Francisco native who was commissioned by Doxey's publishing house. Florence Lundborg was influenced heavily by Aubrey Beardsley, and half-heartedly ripped off their Art Nouveau style. 

I will be analyzing a time in this edition when it follows the themes and the illustration fits with the text in the poem. Figure A is an image of a book and the surrounding floating flower petals fits well with the overall theme of these three stanzas. "Oh threats of Hell and Hopes of Paradise/The Flower that once has blown for ever dies//" and "The Revelations of Devout and Learn'd/Are all but Stories which, awoke from sleep/They told their comrades, and to sleep return'd.//" The stanzas are talking about the importance of this life, staying present, and is criticizing the idea of living for a promise of an afterlife not proven. The illustration includes the flower petals, which represent the dead souls who have "blown away" and they surround a book, which is held by someone living. The imagery is creating a fantastical dream-like scene, calling back to the comrades who "return'd" to sleep, as if to show the feeling of these people falling back to sleep out of boredom of the "Prophets Revelations." The themes of death, captured in stanza LXIV, "Strange, is it not? that of the myriads who/Before us pass'd the door of Darkness through,/Not one returns to tell us of the Road,/Which to discover we must travel too.//" We are asked to think about death in its finality, linked with the previous stanza about the flower petals symbolizing the dead. These flowers, or souls, have passed on through death's door and the only way to know what they know is to die ourselves. The image of the book is asking us to read this tome of death, understand our own mortality, to understand the wisdom of the dead when death comes for us. It's also interesting that the border around the text matches up pretty well with the opened book. This reads as a meta depiction of the poem itself. The book could be thought of as the edition it is literally in and the hand that holds it open could be there to represent our actual participation in the act of reading it. This would be ironic and subversive because the stanzas are critiquing the prophets and their teachings, while simultaneously depicting the Rubáiyát as if it is in place of a religious text, whether that be the Qur'an or the Bible. 

This pairing is capturing the overall themes and messaging of the poem as a whole. This is a moment in the text where I think Lundborg did well to represent the story of the poem through illustration and capture within it the feeling its langauge is trying to invoke.