Lucy Vickery presents this week’s Competition
In Competition No. 2690 you were invited to invited to submit quatrains reflecting on current events in the Middle East in the style of Edward FitzGerald/Omar Khayyam.
FitzGerald is, of course, master of the beautifully turned aphoristic phrase. And, as Cedric Watts points out in his introduction to the Wordsworth Classics edition of the Rubaiyat, though he makes it looks effortless the rhyme scheme he uses in his translation — mostly AABA, though occasionally AAAA— is difficult to maintain; especially, as he does so fluently, for stanza after stanza.
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