Ah, my Belovèd, fill the Cup that clears
Today of past Regrets and future Fears:
Tomorrow!—Why, Tomorrow I may be
Myself with Yesterday’s Sev’n thousand Years.

These lines come from Edward FitzGerald’s Victorian-era English rendering of the Persian poet Omar Khayyám, published as Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (first edition 1859; later revised). FitzGerald was not producing a literal translation so much as a free adaptation shaped by his own sensibility and by contemporary tastes for melancholy, skepticism, and carpe diem philosophy. The speaker addresses a “Belovèd” in the familiar wine-and-companionship setting of Khayyám’s quatrains, urging immediate consolation against the anxieties of time. The stanza belongs to the poem’s recurring meditation on mortality, the brevity of life, and the futility of worrying about an unknowable future.

The quatrain urges a deliberate narrowing of attention to the present moment. Wine—“the Cup”—functions both literally and symbolically as a means of dissolving mental burdens: regret over the past and fear of the future. The abrupt “Tomorrow!” punctures the illusion that the future is guaranteed; the speaker imagines that by tomorrow he may already be absorbed into the vast anonymity of time (“Yesterday’s Sev’n thousand Years”), i.e., dead and indistinguishable from the innumerable dead before him. The stanza’s force lies in its blend of tenderness (“my Belovèd”) and existential bluntness, turning mortality into an argument for immediacy, pleasure, and emotional presence.