’Tis all a Checkerboard of Nights and Days
Where Destiny with Men for Pieces plays:
Hither and thither moves, and mates, and slays,
And one by one back in the Closet lays.

These lines come from Edward FitzGerald’s celebrated Victorian-era English rendering of the Persian poet Omar Khayyám, published as the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (first edition 1859; later revised). FitzGerald’s version is not a literal translation so much as a free adaptation shaped by mid-19th-century English poetic tastes and his own philosophical temperament. The “checkerboard” image belongs to a cluster of quatrains in which human life is figured as a game played by an impersonal Fate or Destiny, reflecting the poem’s recurring preoccupation with mortality, the limits of human agency, and the swift, indifferent passage of time.

The quatrain casts existence as a game of draughts or chess played on a board of alternating “Nights and Days.” Humans are reduced to pieces moved about by “Destiny,” which can advance, trap (“mates”), or destroy (“slays”) without regard to individual desire. The final image—each piece returned “one by one back in the Closet”—suggests death as a quiet, inevitable packing-away after brief animation. The effect is both fatalistic and leveling: status, intention, and struggle matter less than the impersonal rules of the game. In FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát, this vision often underwrites the poem’s carpe diem urgency: since control is limited, one should value the present.