After a momentary silence spake
Some Vessel of a more ungainly Make;
“They sneer at me for leaning all awry:
What! did the Hand then of the Potter shake?”

These lines come from Edward FitzGerald’s Victorian-era English rendering of the Persian poet Omar Khayyám, published as The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (first issued anonymously in 1859 and repeatedly revised). In the poem’s recurring “potter and pots” episode, earthen vessels speak in a workshop, debating fate, design, and responsibility. FitzGerald uses the conceit of clay shaped by a potter to dramatize human anxiety about imperfection and suffering: if a person is made “awry,” is the fault in the creature or in the maker? The passage reflects mid-19th-century English fascination with Persian literature and FitzGerald’s own skeptical, fatalistic coloring of Khayyám’s quatrains.

The “ungainly” vessel protests being mocked for its crookedness and turns the accusation upward: if it is misshapen, did the potter’s hand tremble? The question presses a theological and moral dilemma—whether flaws in human character or circumstance imply a flaw (or injustice) in the creator, or whether the created thing can be blamed for what it was made to be. In FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát, such moments sharpen the poem’s fatalism: humans are fashioned, used, and broken by forces beyond their control, yet they still demand an explanation. The tone is both plaintive and defiant, making the pot’s complaint a proxy for human protest against destiny.