James Elroy Flecker

It tells the story of Hassan, a young man from Baghdad who embarks on a journey to Samarkand, a city in Central Asia.

Henry Ainley played Hassan, with Leon Quartermaine, Malcolm Keen, Esme Percy, Cathleen Nesbitt, Basil Gill and Laura Cowie in the cast.

[10] Percy Fletcher conducted the music after the second performance, and recorded a selection of numbers from the production with the orchestra and chorus of His Majesty's Theatre in November 1923.

It caught the fancy of English audiences at the time, perhaps because of the escape implied in its exotic setting and a post-war vogue for oriental imagery, and its wistful ending of death, by execution, and a hoped for reunion and love in the afterlife, a theme that would have resonated for the survivors of the Great War, remembering those who died in the war.

Jorge Luis Borges quotes a quatrain from Flecker's poem "To a Poet a Thousand Years Hence" in his essay "Note on Walt Whitman" (available in the collection Other Inquisitions, 1937–1952): O friend unseen, unborn, unknown,Student of our sweet English tongue,Read out my words at night, alone:I was a poet, I was young.Nevil Shute quotes from Hassan in Marazan (1926), his first published novel, and in the headings of many of the chapters in his 1951 novel Round the Bend.

The Pilgrims' Song from Hassan and its setting by Delius play a pivotal role at the beginning of Elizabeth Goudge's novel The Castle on the Hill (1942).

[14] Tracy Bond quotes an amended stanza from Hassan in the 1969 film On Her Majesty's Secret Service as she looks out of the window of Piz Gloria at the sun rising over the Swiss alps: Thy dawn, O Master of the World, thy dawn;For thee the sunlight creeps across the lawn,For thee the ships are drawn down to the waves,For thee the markets throng with myriad slaves,For thee the hammer on the anvil rings,For thee the poet of beguilement sings.The original in Flecker's play is more romantic, and makes clear that the Caliph is being addressed, not the Almighty: Thy dawn O Master of the world, thy dawn;The hour the lilies open on the lawn,The hour the grey wings pass beyond the mountains,The hour of silence, when we hear the fountains,The hour that dreams are brighter and winds colder,The hour that young love wakes on a white shoulder,O Master of the world, the Persian Dawn.That hour, O Master, shall be bright for thee:Thy merchants chase the morning down the sea,The braves who fight thy war unsheathe the sabre,The slaves who work thy mines are lashed to labour,For thee the waggons of the world are drawn – The ebony of night, the red of dawn!In Flashman at the Charge (1973), author George MacDonald Fraser concludes a final scene with a decasyllable quatrain pastiche in Flecker’s style.

Following many misadventures suffered by the book’s picaresque hero Harry Flashman, brother-in-arms rebel leader Yakub Beg waxes poetic and evokes the mystique of middle Asia with its concomitant voyage of self-discovery and friendships hard-won by reciting: To learn the age-old lesson day by day:It is not in the bright arrival planned,But in the dreams men dream along the way,They find the Golden Road to Samarkand.Flecker's poem "The Bridge of Fire" features in Neil Gaiman's Sandman series, in the volume The Wake, and The Golden Journey to Samarkand is quoted in the volume World's End.

In Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy,[15] the young English Literature lecturer Dr Pran Kapoor attempts to reduce colonial influence in the syllabus and suggests removing Flecker (to make room for James Joyce).