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Handwritten manuscript by Samuel Clemens, unsigned, 45 pages, 5.75 x 2.25, no date. Clemens drafts his satirical poem, 'To the Above Old People'—an intentional parody and inversion of the famous Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám translated by Edward FitzGerald—writing out each quatrain on a separate slip of scrap paper, possibly so that they could be arranged and rearranged. Instead of romanticizing or philosophizing deep melancholy, epicurean indulgence, or the wine-soaked wisdom of old age, Twain pokes fun at the solemn advice given by elderly people. The poem was published in his 1900 collection The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg and Other Stories and Sketches.
It begins: "Sleep! for the Sun that scores another Day / Against the Tale allotted You to stay, / Reminding You, is Risen, and now / Serves Notice—ah, ignore it while You may! / The chill Wind blew, & those who stood before / The Tavern murmured, ‘Having drunk his Score, / Why tarries He with empty Cup? Behold, / The Wine of Youth once poured, is poured no more. / ‘Come, leave the Cup, & on the Winter’s Snow / Your Summer Garment of Enjoyment throw: / Your Tide of Life is ebbing fast, and it, / Exhausted once, for You no more shall flow.’ / While yet the Phantom of false Youth was mine, / I heard a Voice from out the Darkness whine, / ‘O Youth, O whither gone? Return, / And bathe my Age in thy reviving Wine.’"
This draft of the poem carries a few handwritten corrections and amendments, and differs slightly from the text as published. In overall fine condition. Housed in a custom-made full morocco case.
This remarkable 45-page working manuscript offers a rare glimpse of Mark Twain’s creative process at the turn of the twentieth century, when he was increasingly using parody to puncture the moral certainty, sentimentality, and solemn philosophizing of his age. In “To the Above Old People,” Clemens takes as his target Edward FitzGerald’s enormously influential Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, whose meditations on mortality, vanished youth, and the fleeting pleasures of life had become a cultural phenomenon in the English-speaking world. Twain deliberately turns that elevated, melancholy mode on its head, recasting its imagery and cadence as a comic assault on the tiresome admonitions of old age.
The manuscript is especially revealing because Clemens composed the poem quatrain by quatrain on individual scraps, a format that may have allowed him to shuffle, test, and refine their sequence, while the surviving corrections and textual differences document the poem before it reached its published form. More than a draft of a humorous poem, the manuscript captures Twain actively dismantling one of the era’s most recognizable literary styles, transforming a celebrated meditation on mortality into a characteristically irreverent meditation on aging.
