Learned Individuals
There are characters of the learned individuals i.e. the doctors and saints. The poet says that these learned individuals consider themselves intellectuals and remain busy in various arguments and dogmas. The poet considers their scholarship useless, because it only led them to prove their point by denying the beliefs of others. According to Omar Khayyam, despite of being learned persons, the doctors and saints pass through the same doors through which the poet enters. The poet scorns the scholars for their philosophical thoughts about past and future and consider them as meaningless because their efforts will be futile in death.
Drunkard
There is a character who always drinks wine. It is perhaps the poet himself who considers wine as a mean of finding one’s motive in life. The drunkard praises wine for making him forgetful about the miseries of his past and the fears of his future. He believes that wine will help him in understanding life and it will enable him to live in the present moment. Although people accuse him of living a sinful life but he considers wine and his life in tavern as the main source of reaching the divine.
A Crying Man
The poet has also demonstrated a character who cries on his fate. Through the depiction of this character, the poet has promulgated the idea that fate is something pre-written and we cannot fight it. The poet says, ‘The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit, Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.’ According to the narrator, it is futile to challenge our fates. The poet has criticized the people who attempts to change their fate through their faith or their wisdom. It has been propagated through portraying a crying man that all efforts to think beyond the present moment are destined to fail because a man has to surrender before the plans of the Almighty. His intelligence, scholarship, determination, religiosity or stubbornness can not alter what has been already written by the God.
