The Moving Finger
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
How much choice do we have to shape each day to our desire, and how much is simply predestined? How far can we resist the external forces that press down on us, whether natural, social, or even spiritual? In the book of life, are we the writers or the written on, the paper or the pen?
These questions and many more are posed by this elegant and enigmatic stanza, with its image of "the Moving Finger" that writes and "moves on" remorselessly, without a drop of ink spilt or word forgotten. To whom does it belong? Could it be God or the poet himself? Or is it a metaphor for nothing possessed of consciousness, such as an impersonal fate or a clockwork universe grinding us to dust?
In this English translation of the Persian original, the language deliberately evokes the Biblical story from which we derive the phrase "to see the writing on the wall," referring to a moment when we realize we are in a dire situation—crunch time.
In this episode from the Book of Daniel, Belshazzar the king throws a party for his royal retinue. They quaff wine from the sacred vessels taken from the Temple, the house of God in Jerusalem, and praise the pagan idols. Suddenly the king sees a ghostly hand writing words on the wall—words that pronounce his doom. God has weighed up his life and found him wanting. That very night he loses his kingdom and is killed. This tale, pointing out the frailty of earthly authority, is the subject of a dramatic painting by Rembrandt, in which the king reels back at the sight of the glowing letters.
Yet the image of the moving finger writing on a page evokes a range of other religious and philosophical conceptions of God and existence. It recalls, for instance, the Word in the New Testament, a symbol of God as the compassionate Christ. This Word, however, derives from the pre-Christian logos mentioned by thinkers like Heraclitus who spoke of it not as a being, but as a unifying principle behind the change all around us. The finger that "moves on" also suggests the Aristotelian notion of the prime mover: A God who set matter into motion, but remains indifferent to humanity. By bringing these ideas together and encouraging us to explore their nuances, the poem prompts us to discover what we believe.
Such personal contemplation, with its objective, rigorous honesty is something we tend to shy away from. We try to escape reality through "Piety" and "Wit," through religious dogma or intellectual abstraction, but nothing changes the great universals of life. Nothing changes the pain of suffering, the humiliations of aging, our inability to change the past, guess the future, or capture the elusive present. We are thrown into the world and have barely a minute to make sense of it before we vanish.
It is the "moving finger" of the artist, poet, or otherwise, that helps us see through what is mere convention and face whatever lies outside—chaos or higher vision. This poem, through its careful balance of sound and meaning, persuades us that yes, here is something of the truth. Notice, for instance, how the third line breaks the precise opening couplet, as if questing for another perspective (a desire to "cancel half a line"?), but which is then defeated.
The rhyme scheme reasserts itself in the final line, shutting the poem as if it were an ivory box, but opening our mind to heaven. That final line, with its ten monosyllables, has a clarion simplicity. Its power is compounded by the scornful, almost colloquial quality of the phrasing, which recalls the dismissive everyday expression, "down the drain with all of it," though here we face the equal possibility of nothing being discarded, with an underlying implication of judgment.
Ultimately, the poem is not at all comforting. We look for solace and receive a slap. We may bawl our eyes out, but whatever wrong we've done will never be erased. Yet in realizing that, we are given a renewed sense of the moral consequences of our actions, in the cosmic drama of the most ordinary day.
Omar Khayyam (1048–1131) was a Persian poet, mathematician, philosopher, and astronomer. "The Moving Finger" is taken from Edward Fitzgerald's translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam published in 1859, which deviates from the original to create a work of joint authorship and a unique meeting of East and West.
Christopher Nield is a poet living in London.
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.
Feeds