Quatrain 57
Quatrain 57 of 75
“Oh Thou who didst with Pitfall and with Gin
Beset the Road I was to wander in,
Thou wilt not with Predestination round
Enmesh me, and impute my Fall to Sin?”
Reflection · Autumn
The logic is perfect and unanswerable. If Thou set the pitfalls and the snares on the road before I walked it, and I walked into them because I was on that road, and I was on that road because the predestination round had already enmeshed me — how can You then call my falling Sin? This is Khayyam the mathematician using formal logic to argue with the universe.
In autumn the verse lands with the weight of all the falls of the year. The pitfalls that were invisible in spring, that became apparent in summer, that are now the record of autumn — Khayyam is asking the fundamental question of responsibility.