As regards subject matter, Omar's quatrains may be classed under the following six heads:—
I. Shikayat i rozgar—Complaints of «the wheel of heaven,» or fate, of the world's injustice, of the loss of friends, of man's limited faculties and destinies.
II. Hajw—Satires on the hypocrisy of the «unco' guid,» the impiety of the pious, the ignorance of the learned, and the untowardness of his own generation.
III. Firakiya and Wisaliya—Love-poems on the sorrows of separation and the joys of reunion with the Beloved, earthly or spiritual.
IV. Bahariya—Poems in praise of spring, gardens, and flowers.
V. Kufriya—Irreligious and antinomian utterances, charging the sins of the creature to the account of the Creator, scoffing at the Prophet's Paradise and Hell, singing the praises of wine and pleasure—preaching ad nauseam, «eat and drink (especially drink), for to-morrow ye die.»
VI. Munajat—Addresses to the Deity, now in the ordinary language of devotion, bewailing sins and imploring pardon, now in Mystic phraseology, craving deliverance from «self,» and union with the «Truth» (Al Hakk), or Deity, as conceived by the Mystics.
The «complaints» may obviously be connected with the known facts of the poet's life, by supposing them to have been prompted by the persecution to which he was subjected on account of his opinions. His remarks on the Houris and other sacred subjects raised such a feeling against him that at one time his life was in danger, and the wonder is that he escaped at all in a city like Naishapur, where the odium theologicum raged so fiercely as to occasion a sanguinary civil war. In the year 489 a.h., as we learn from Ibn Al Athir,[101] the orthodox banded themselves together under the leadership of Abul Kasim and Muhammad, the chiefs of the Hanefites and the Shafeites, in order to exterminate the Kerramians or Anthropomorphist heretics, and succeeded in putting many of them to death, and destroying all their establishments. It may be also that after the death of his patron, Nizam ul Mulk, Omar lost his stipend and was reduced to poverty.
The satires probably owed their origin to the same cause. Rien soulage comme la rhetorique, and if Omar could not relieve his feelings by open abuse of his persecutors, he made up for it by the bitterness of his verses. The bitterness of his strictures on them was no doubt fully equalled by the rancour of their attacks upon him.
The love-poems are samples of a class of compositions much commoner in later poets than in Omar. Most of them probably bear a mystical meaning, for I doubt if Omar was a person very susceptible of the tender passion. He speaks with appreciation of «tulip cheeks» and «cypress forms,» but apparently recognises no attractions of a higher order in his fair friends.