Rubáiyát of a Motor Car — Edition Insights

Mechanical Quatrains and Comic Form

Wells preserves the Rubáiyát’s characteristic aaba rhyme scheme but fills it with anachronistic vocabulary: “crank,” “valve,” “sprocket drum,” “jockey-pulley.” The formal constraint forces technical terms into the meter, producing lines like “Come, fill the Tank, adjust the Valve and Spring.” The effect is a deliberate awkwardness that mirrors the unreliability of early cars.

Several stanzas hinge on a single pun or substitution. “The Wine of Life is in a Motor Trip” replaces Khayyám’s grape with gasoline, while “The Bird Of Time wants but to get away” is glossed as “(I think that name’s a rather Clever Thing!)”—a self-aware wink at the forced analogy. Wells also inverts the original’s gravity: where Khayyám’s “moving finger” writes and moves on, Wells’s finger cranks a car that may or may not start.

Consumer Anxiety and Mechanical Failure

The poem’s central tension is between the promise of freedom and the reality of breakdowns. The speaker celebrates “Automobile Elation” but immediately adds “(Though all the Parts keep breaking One by One!).” This parenthetical complaint recurs throughout: the car is both a “Glorious Game” and a “Toy on which one spends a Pile.”

Wells satirizes the early adopter’s dilemma. “Each Year a Hundred Models brings,” she writes, “but who buys the Car of Yesterday?” The speaker pores over catalogues, debates gear-driven versus jockey-pulley systems, and hears salesmen argue that red paint or a louder horn makes a car superior. The quatrains capture the frenzy of a market where last year’s model instantly becomes obsolete—a pattern familiar to modern readers.

The Parodic Frame and Its Limits

Wells dedicates the book “To the crank that makes the machine go,” a pun that collapses the mechanical crank with the eccentric enthusiast. The dedication sets a tone of affectionate mockery. Yet the poem’s relationship to its source is not purely satirical: it borrows Khayyám’s structure of carpe diem stanzas, but the urgency is now directed at buying, repairing, and upgrading a car.

The excerpts do not reveal whether the poem maintains this comic tone throughout or shifts toward genuine frustration. The speaker’s complaint that “all the Parts keep breaking One by One” hints at a darker undercurrent, but the surviving stanzas remain buoyant. Readers familiar with the original Rubáiyát will notice which themes Wells omits—death, fate, the unknowable—and which she amplifies: brand loyalty, mechanical tinkering, and the thrill of speed.

This edition preserves Frederick Strothmann’s original illustrations, which complement Wells’s visual puns. Readers may wish to compare specific quatrains with FitzGerald’s translation to see how Wells transforms philosophical resignation into automotive exasperation. The poem is best read as a period piece—a snapshot of 1906 motoring culture—but its jokes about planned obsolescence and salesman hype remain sharp more than a century later.

Years among these shelves have taught me that humor often hides the deepest truths. That Rubáiyát of a Motor Car grumbles about clanking engines, yet beneath the gasoline wit lies a gentle sigh at our frantic modern ways. Oddly, it whispers in kinship with the older Humors Looking Glasse — Reading Notes, both laughing softly at the absurd mirrors we hold up to ourselves.