You know, my friends, with what a brave carouse I made a Second Marriage in my house favored old barren reason from my bed, and took the daughter of the vine to spouse.

This line is not from a surviving Persian work in Omar Khayyám’s own hand, but from Edward FitzGerald’s highly free Victorian English rendering of quatrains attributed to Khayyám in the tradition of the Rubáiyát. FitzGerald’s poem (first published in 1859 and repeatedly revised) dramatizes a speaker who rejects austere rationalism and conventional piety in favor of wine, conviviality, and immediate experience. The phrasing “Second Marriage,” “old barren reason,” and “daughter of the vine” reflects FitzGerald’s idiom and his tendency to personify abstractions, shaping Khayyám’s reputation in English as a skeptical, wine-celebrating philosopher-poet.

The speaker casts his turn to wine as a deliberate “marriage,” a chosen allegiance that displaces “old barren reason.” “Reason” is figured as sterile—incapable of yielding consolation or certainty—while wine (the “daughter of the vine”) becomes a fertile, sensuous alternative that promises warmth, fellowship, and forgetfulness. The boastful “brave carouse” frames this as both defiance and self-therapy: an embrace of embodied pleasure against the anxieties produced by metaphysical speculation. In the Rubáiyát’s larger mood, the line also hints at a critique of moralistic restraint and a preference for lived immediacy over abstract systems that cannot resolve life’s impermanence.