The Down-Turned Glass

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 493, 3 December 1948, Page 9

The Down-Turned Glass

HE Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, as read by Sir Ralph Richardson (2ZB, Sunday, November 21) was an edifying and dramatically satisfying experience, but those of us who have tended to identify Old Omar with the joyous youth in which we first discovered him may feel some slight regret at having another illusion shattered. For Sir Ralph is actor rather than reciter, and though I suppose there is not much more necessity to deliver the Rubaiyat in the quaver of old age than there is to pipe Blake’s Songs of Innocence in childish treble his interpretation throws new light on the whole thing. "Come, fill the cup, and in the fire of spring The winter garment of repentance fling" is not the exuberant and safe defiance of the young man for whom death is far away but the braver challenge of an old man, for whom it is just round the corner. And accustomed as I am to hearing "Myself when young" roared in lusty bass it came as something of a shock to hear it spoken with the puzzled bewilderment of still questing age. The philosophising had more bitterness than I have usually read into it, and there was even a faint flavour of Polonius in the moralising, and in the fussiness of "Ah, lean upon it lightly, for who knows From what once lovely lip it springs unseen." And what sea-change has overtaken the gay hedonism of "Here with a loaf of bread beneath the bough?" Sir Ralph Richardson’s Rubaiyat is an indication that we do need more and less hackneyed renderings of the hackneyed classics.