Penny Dreadfuls, 1900 · page 76 of 142
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, and the Salaman and Absal of Jami — page 76: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This is a page of running prose from the middle of a book (page 50). It is part of an introductory or critical essay titled "Notice of Jami's Life," discussing the structure and poetic meter of an Eastern literary work. The text explains that the poem intersperses a main narrative with subsidiary stories in comic and grotesque style, uses the "Metre Royal" employed by poets like Attar and Jelaluddin, and provides examples of the meter's pattern in Latin and English verse forms to illustrate how the rhythmic structure functions.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
; Ic 50 NOTICE OF JAMI’S LIFE. doctrine which he dared not—and probably could not—more intelligibly reveal. As usual with such Poems in the story-loving Hast, the main Fable is intersected at every turn with some other subsidiary story, more or less illustrative of the matter in hand: many of these of a comic and grotesque Character mimicking the more serious, as may the Gracioso of the Spanish Drama. As for the metre of the Poem, it is the same as that adopted by Attar, Jelaluddin and other such Poets—and styled, as I have heard, the ‘‘Metre MRoyal’—although not having been used by Firdusi for his Shah-nameh. Thus it runs : ged heagee ara, ac toe | al a pace which, to those not used to it, seems to bring one up with too sudden a halt at the end of every line to promise easy travelling through an Hpic. It may be represented in Monkish«Latin Quantity : Dum Salaman verba Regis cogitat, Pectus illi de profundis zstuat ; or by English accent in two lines that may also plead for us and our Allegory : Of Saldéman and of Absal hear the Song ; Little wants man here below, nor little long. =a 4N >> CORnnICLOO 4 (CO)