The Rubaiyat of a Huffy Husband — A Closer Reading

Parody as Domestic Satire

The poem opens with a direct inversion of Khayyam's famous dawn: “I wake, the Sun does scatter into Flight / The Dreams of Happiness I have each Night.” Where the original celebrates the moment, the husband mourns the loss of “Domestic Bliss.” The wife's fad is compared to earlier collecting hobbies—vases, fans, spoons—that did not affect “the Comfort of our Home.” The parody operates by mapping Khayyam's carpe diem philosophy onto a husband's desire for attention. When the wife quotes “A Book of verses underneath the Bough,” the husband retorts that “A Wilderness were Paradise just Now,” twisting the line into a complaint about being read to. The poem's structure—a series of quatrains—mirrors the original, but its content systematically deflates the original's themes.

The Wife's Voice and the Husband's Resistance

The wife is never directly quoted; her words are reported through the husband's exasperated paraphrases. She says, “I will read,” and then recites lines like “With Earth's first Clay they did the Last man knead.” The husband's response is physical flight: “I take my hat, and hasten from the House.” He refuses to listen, calling the doctrine “Devoid of Sense.” The wife's devotion is described as a creed: “the Rubaiyat's her Creed. / It is her Comfort in all sorts of Need.” The husband's impotent rage—“I tear my hair—I storm—I swear”—contrasts with her serene absorption. This asymmetry drives the comedy: the more he protests, the more she clings to Omar.

Catalog Subjects vs. Textual Evidence

The catalog lists this work under “Omar Khayyam — Parodies, imitations, etc.” and “Humorous poetry,” which accurately describes its form and tone. However, the secondary subject “Fantasy & Juvenile Worlds” is misleading: the poem is a domestic satire with no fantastical elements. The speaker is an adult husband, not a child, and the setting is a contemporary home. The humor derives from marital friction, not imagination or wonder. Readers expecting fantasy will find instead a realistic complaint. The poem's brevity (4,109 words) and simple quatrain structure might suggest juvenile appeal, but its irony and allusions to Khayyam assume adult familiarity with the source text.

Little's parody succeeds by maintaining the formal constraints of the Rubaiyat while inverting its spirit. Readers familiar with FitzGerald's translation will recognize the borrowed rhythms and occasional direct quotations, but the poem stands on its own as a snapshot of early twentieth-century domestic humor. The husband's voice—petulant, self-justifying, and ultimately powerless—makes the parody work without needing knowledge of the original.

This huffy husband's quatrains remind me of evenings in my grandmother's parlor, her old copy of Omar worn soft at the corners. She'd read aloud, half-laughing, half-sighing. Another afternoon, I found the same wry melancholy in The Poetical Works of Mark Akenside — Inside the Classic, where even philosophy feels like a gentle, private quarrel with the world.