8 Shahrivar 1405
Quatrain 6 of 75
“And David's Lips are lock't; but in divine
High piping Pelevi, with "Wine! Wine! Wine!
Red Wine!"—the Nightingale cries to the Rose
That yellow Cheek of hers to'incarnadine.”
Reflection · Summer 1405
In summer the nightingale's cry shifts from supplication to insistence. The rose is fully open now — there is nothing tentative about a summer rose, no hesitation in its crimson. The Wine! Wine! Red Wine! of Tir and Mordad is not a plea to bloom; it is a celebration of what has already bloomed. Pelevi — the old tongue of pre-Islamic Persia — carries in it the weight of everything that was sung before the Arab conquest changed the language of the land.
When Khayyam invokes it, he is invoking a continuity of Persian singing that runs under history like a river under ice, unchanged by whatever names the rulers used. The nightingale sings in Pelevi still. The rose understands. Summer wine, summer roses, summer desire — none of it waiting for permission, none of it apologizing for the loudness of its wanting.