One line "... A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread--and Thou ... " has been rattling around in my head since I was Rowen's age. I immediately recognized it as a pickup line of Garfield's owner in one of the earlier Garfield strips (I used to own and continually reread all of the Garfield books that I could find). I was even able to find the strip.
More surprisingly, we JUST YESTERDAY watched an episode of The Big Bang Theory that referenced this poem:
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.
A low quality video of the pertinent scene from The Big Bang Theory can be found here.
It amazes me how little bits and pieces of history and literature float around in our periphery without our having any knowledge of them. I think this is one of the things I like most about being a student (and teacher) of the humanities. Each little crumb of knowledge widens my view of the world and of myself.
*Note: Not only did Khayyam probably not write most of the poems, but the most famous English translation of them (by Edward Fitzgerald in 1859) which we will use in class was focused more on the spirit of the poems than their actual content. Thus, the poems we are going to read are only kind of similar to the poems that were probably not written by this famous Persian scholar. The selection we are going to read is here.