Quatrain 6
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 · Spring
David's lips are locked — the psalms are finished, the divine singer of the Judeo-Islamic tradition is silenced by death. And yet the nightingale sings on in the ancient Persian tongue, Pelevi, the oldest language of this land, crying Wine! Wine! Red Wine! to the rose, imploring her to flush her yellow cheek back to crimson. This is the oldest metaphor in Persian poetry and Khayyam uses it without apology. The nightingale is the lover. The rose is the beloved. The wine is desire itself — not wine the drink but wine the urgency, the thing that makes you cry out in the ancient tongue because ordinary language has failed.
In spring this verse is almost embarrassingly apt. The nightingale — the bulbul — actually sings in Persian gardens in spring, actually addresses the actual rose. Khayyam is not inventing a metaphor; he is noticing the metaphor that nature itself performs every year when Ordibehesht arrives. Go outside. Listen. The Pelevi is still being sung.