SADAKICHI HARTMANN
MY RUBAIYAT
Copyright, 1916, by Sadakichi Hartmann
INSTEAD OF A PREFACE:
I will drop the mask and tell you the secret of my verses.You say they impress you as being uneven and unfinished. Iheartily agree with you. As I have stated in my announcementto the public, a poem of the scope and range of “My Rubaiyat”is never complete. No doubt, it will undergo many changeswithin the next ten years. I say ten years deliberately. Yousee, I possess the arrogance of conviction. I believe it willsurvive, simply because it strikes a popular chord, and attempts,no matter how vaguely, to reproduce a broken melody that humsin every mind. Somebody else may venture forth on similarpaths and succeed to please even the fastidious in rhyme. “MyRubaiyat” may be put on the back shelves. Well, we will see.I look at my work with objective eyes. It is a mere youngsternow. It will grow and nobody will watch its growth with keenerappreciation than I myself. The number of verses will not increase,but I sincerely hope that they will gain in clarity andstrength as well as in musical and pictorial wealth of expression.
As for versification, let me make this explanation. I chose theeight syllable stanza on account of its terseness of expression. Itis least pliable to any rush and swing of rhythm, but most conduciveto the conveyance of fragmentary moods and thoughts.The omission of rhyme I essayed for no other reason than itstechnical difficulty. To make rhymeless lines read like a poemis the most laborious task a songsmith can set himself. It is thevanity of the alien to show his mastery over a language that wasneither his father’s nor his mother’s tongue. But I object toyour statement that I disdain rhythm. I have a vague suspicionthat you really mean meter. My meter is rough and wilful andsubject to impurities, as for instance counting the last two syllablesin words like “happier” and “sunnier” either as one or two,just as my fancy, or rather my appreciation of rhythm, dictates.My rhythm changes constantly but it is palpable, underneath asit were, at all times. I have some experience as a reader (thoughelocutionists may shrug their shoulders at my style of interpretation—letthem shrug) and I have, whenever I write, the habit ofreading aloud the words as I put them down. Reading means toget a certain sense and swing, color and sound in the words asone utters them. If my verses contain this possibility of auralgratification they cannot be utterly devoid of rhythm. No doubtmy s