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(From Guests of the State)
A VISION of a River, and a Land | |
| Where no rain falls, which is the river’s bed, | |
| Through which it flows from waters far away, | |
| Great lakes, and springs unknown, increasing slow, | |
| Till the midsummer currents, rushing red, | 5 |
| Come overflowing the banks day after day, | |
| Like ocean billows that devour the strand, | |
| Till, lo! there is no land, | |
| Save the cliffs of granite that enclose their flow, | |
| And the waste sands beyond; subsiding then | 10 |
| Till land comes up again, and the husbandmen | |
| (Chanting hymns the while) | |
| Sow their sure crops, which till midwinter be | |
| Green, gladdening the old Nile | |
| As he goes on his gracious journey to the Sea! | 15 |
| Land of strange gods, human, and beast, and bird, | |
| Where animals were sacred and adored, | |
| The great bull Apis being of these the chief; | |
| Pasth, with her woman’s breast and lion face, | |
| Maned, with her long arms stretching down her thighs; | 20 |
| Dog-faced Anubis, haler of the dead | |
| To judgment; Nu, with the ram’s head and curled horns; | |
| And Athor, whom a templed crown adorns; | |
| And Mut, the vulture; and the higher Three,— | |
| The goddess-mother Isis, and her lord, | 25 |
| Divine Osiris, whom dark Typhon slew, | |
| For whom, in her great grief | |
| (Leading unfathered Horus, weeping too), | |
| She wandered up and down, lamenting sore, | |
| Searching for lost Osiris: Libya heard | 30 |
| Her lamentations, and her rainy eyes | |
| Flooded the shuddering Nile from shore to shore, | |
| Till she had found, in many a secret place, | |
| The poor dismembered body (can it be | |
| These are supreme Osiris?) whereat she | 35 |
| Gathered the dear remains that Typhon hid, | |
| And builded over each a Pyramid | |
| In thirty cities, and was queen no more; | |
| For Horus governed in his father’s stead, | |
| The crowns of Earth and Heaven on his anointed head! | 40 |
| From out the mists of hoar Antiquity | |
| Straggle uncertain figures, gods or men— | |
| Menes, Athothis, Cheops, and Khafren; | |
| No matter who these last were, what they did, | |
| Save that each raised a monstrous Pyramid | 45 |
| To house his mummy, and they rise to-day | |
| Rifled thereof! And she— | |
| Colossal Woman, couchant in the sands, | |
| Who has a lion’s body, paws for hands | |
| (If she was wingéd, like the Theban one, | 50 |
| The wide-spread wings are gone): | |
| Nations have fallen round her, but she stands; | |
| Dynasties came and went, but she went not: | |
| She saw the Pharaohs and the Shepherd Kings, | |
| Chariots and horsemen in their dread array— | 55 |
| Cambyses, Alexander, Anthony, | |
| The hosts of standards, and the eagle wings, | |
| Whom, to her ruinous sorrow, Egypt drew: | |
| She saw, and she forgot— | |
| Remembered not the old gods nor the new, | 60 |
| Which were to her as though they had not been; | |
| Remembered not the opulent, great Queen, | |
| Whom riotous misbecomings so became— | |
| Temptress, whom none could tame, | |
| Splendor and danger, fatal to beguile; | 65 |
| Remembered not the serpent of old Nile, | |
| Nor the Herculean Roman she loved and overthrew! | |
| Half buried in the sand it lies: | |
| It neither questions nor replies; | |
| And what is coming, what is gone, | 70 |
| Disturbs it not: it looks straight on, | |
| Under the everlasting skies, | |
| In what eternal Eyes! | |
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| Out of all this a Presence comes, and stands | |
| Full-fronted, as who turns upon the Past, | 75 |
| Modern among the ancients, and the last | |
| Of re-born, risen nations: in her hands, | |
| That once so many sceptres held, and rods, | |
| A palm leaf set with jewels: Princess, she— | |
| She has her palaces along the Nile, | 80 |
| Her navies on the sea; | |
| And in the temples of her fallen gods | |
| (Not hers—she knows but the One God over all), | |
| She hears from holy mosques the muezzin’s call, | |
| “Lo, Allah is most great!” And when the dawn | 85 |
| Is drawing near, “Prayer better is than Sleep.” | |
| She rides abroad; her curtains are undrawn— | |
| She walks with lifted veil, nor hides her smile, | |
| Nor the sweet, luminous eyes, where languors creep | |
| No more: she is no more Circassian girl, | 90 |
| But Princess, woman with the mother breast; | |
| No Cleopatra to dissolve the pearl | |
| And take the asp—the East become the West! | |
| Honor to Egypt—honor; | |
| May Allah smile upon her! | 95 |
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