Ah Love! could you and I with Him conspire
To grasp this Sorry Scheme of Things entire,
Would not we shatter it to bits—and then
Remold it nearer to the Heart’s Desire!

These lines come from Edward FitzGerald’s Victorian-era English rendering of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, first published anonymously in 1859 and repeatedly revised in later editions. FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát is less a literal translation than a free adaptation shaped by mid‑19th‑century doubts about providence, fate, and orthodox religion. The speaker addresses “Love” and imagines conspiring with “Him” (God) to comprehend the world’s flawed design and then break and remake it. The quatrain reflects the poem’s recurring stance: a mixture of metaphysical yearning, skepticism toward any tidy cosmic plan, and a desire to find meaning or consolation in human affection and immediate experience.

The quatrain voices a rebellious, almost Promethean wish: if human love and the divine could jointly understand the universe’s “scheme,” they would reject it as inadequate and rebuild it to match what the heart longs for. It dramatizes the tension between lived suffering and the idea of a benevolent, intelligible order. “Sorry Scheme of Things” suggests a cosmos that feels botched or indifferent; “Heart’s Desire” stands for a more humane, emotionally satisfying reality. In the Rubáiyát’s broader argument, this impulse undercuts confidence in providential explanations and turns attention toward the only remolding available—how we choose to live, love, and value the present despite an unalterable world.