Think, in this batter’d Caravanserai
Whose Portals are alternate Night and Day,
How Sultan after Sultan with his Pomp
Abode his destin’d Hour, and went his way.

These lines come from Edward FitzGerald’s Victorian-era English rendering of the Persian poet Omar Khayyám, published as Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. FitzGerald’s version (first issued anonymously in 1859 and revised in later editions) helped popularize a mood of reflective skepticism and “carpe diem” melancholy in English literature. The stanza uses the image of a “caravanserai” (a roadside inn for travelers on Asian trade routes) as a metaphor for the world: people pass through briefly, as day and night alternate at its gates. The “Sultan after Sultan” evokes the rise and fall of rulers, underscoring impermanence and the leveling force of time.

The quatrain invites the reader to contemplate life as a temporary lodging: a battered inn where travelers arrive, stay for a fixed hour, and depart. The “Portals” of Night and Day suggest an inescapable rhythm that admits everyone and dismisses everyone, regardless of rank. By stressing that even “Sultan after Sultan” with all their ceremony merely “abode his destin’d Hour,” the stanza compresses political grandeur into a brief stopover, implying that power and pomp cannot purchase permanence. In FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát, this meditation on transience typically supports a sober, sensuous present-mindedness: since all must pass on, the present moment becomes the only reliable possession.