CLASSICAL PERSIAN LITERATURE
44
Or were your mother not ignobly base. The slave of lust thou first of all thy race
A poet's merit had inspir'd thy mind, By
science tutor'd, and by worth refin'd. as thou art, the vileness of thy birth
Such
Precludes each generous sentiment of worth: Nor Kingly origin, nor noble race,
Warms
thy low heart, the offspring of disgrace.
After that Firdausi had to run for shelter, which he found in his old age at the provincial court of Tabaristan. There, sonic say,
he composed the romantic idyll Yusufu Ztdaikha, a Koranic theme to atone for so many years wasted on the extolling of pagandom :
modern times this ascription has been shrewdly contested. Finally Firdausi returned to his native Tus, to die there in 1020
in
story that Mahmud repented of his niggardliness 'even too sent, late, a load of precious indigo to the poet as the camels entered the Riidbdr Gate, the corpse of Firdawsf
or 1025.
The
and
was borne forth from the Gate of ideally dramatic ending, but publication of that satire.
is
RazStx'
difficult
-this story makes an to reconcile with the
The
plan conceived by Firdausi for his great work was sufficiently ambitious: he would recount in song the entire history of his motherland, from the creation of man down to the fall of the Sasanian Empire, This plan he completely carried through, in some 60,000 mutaqdril couplets* His chief source was the
prose Shah-ndma of Abu Manur, but other writings, and some oral informants, contributed to the filling in of his massive picture.
The
quasi-historical design presents a somewhat ramshackle appearance to readers familiar with the neater and more confined
pattern of the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Aeneid: it to judge the Shdh-ndma for what it actually
is
more satisfactory
is,
a series of
self-
contained idylls composed at different times over a long period and loosely strung together within a chronological framework, If a central
theme
is
sought, then
it
is
to
be recognized easily