And when like her, O Saki, you shall pass
Among the Guests Star-scatter’d on the Grass,
And in your joyous errand reach the spot
Where I made One—turn down an empty Glass!

These lines come from Edward FitzGerald’s Victorian English rendering of the Persian poet Omar Khayyám’s quatrains, published as the immensely influential Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. FitzGerald’s poem repeatedly stages a convivial, wine-soaked gathering in which the “Saki” (cupbearer) serves wine to the speaker and companions. Here the speaker imagines his own death and asks that, when the cupbearer later passes among the “Guests” (the living, figured as stars scattered on grass), he should honor the speaker’s absence by turning down an empty glass at the spot where the speaker once drank. The tone blends hedonism with elegy, a hallmark of FitzGerald’s adaptation.

The quatrain is a compact memento mori framed in the language of pleasure. The speaker accepts that he will “pass” like others, but rather than seeking consolation in immortality or moral recompense, he asks for a small ritual of remembrance within the ongoing feast of life. “Turn down an empty Glass” functions as a symbolic libation: an acknowledgment of absence amid abundance. The image of guests “Star-scatter’d on the Grass” fuses cosmic scale with earthly conviviality, suggesting that human lives are brief sparks in a larger, indifferent universe. The request is tender and ironic—an elegy that remains faithful to the poem’s carpe diem ethos.