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From Persia to Tyneside and the door of darkness

ONE OF the most popular poems in the English language isn't in origin or essence English at all. It is so popular, and lines from its 125 quatrains so well known, that almost two-thirds of its total length gets into the Oxford Book of Quotations. No other author (not Shakespeare) or book (not the Bible) can supply such a high ratio of words that have stuck in the popular memory. Last week I heard some of them spoken, not for the first time, at a funeral service:

Alas, that spring should vanish with the rose!

That youth's sweet scented manuscript should close!

The nightingale that in the branches sang,

Ah, whence, and wither flown again, who knows!

Our old friend, the Rubaiyat of Omar ...

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