Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, THE BURDEN OF EGYPT, by RICHARD MONCKTON MILNES


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

THE BURDEN OF EGYPT, by                 Poet Analysis     Poet's Biography
First Line: After the phantasies of many a night
Last Line: And, may be, by such faith the light itself is won.
Alternate Author Name(s): Houghton, 1st Baron; Houghton, Lord
Subject(s): Egypt; Nile (river)


I.

AFTER the phantasies of many a night,
After the deep desires of many a day,
Rejoicing as an ancient Eremite
Upon the Desert's edge at last I lay:
Before me rose, in wonderful array,
Those works where man has rivalled Nature most,
Those Pyramids, that fear no more decay
Than waves inflict upon the rockiest coast,
Or winds on mountain-steeps, and like endurance boast.

II.

Fragments the deluge of old Time has left
Behind it in its subsidence -- long Walls
Of cities of their very names bereft --
Lone Columns, remnants of majestic halls, --
Rich-traceried chambers, where the night-dew falls, --
All have I seen with feelings due, I trow,
Yet not with such as these memorials
Of the great unremembered, that can show
The mass and shape they wore four thousand years ago.

III.

The screaming Arabs left me there alone,
Hoping small gain from one who silent dreamed;
Till o'er the sand each solemn shadow thrown
Like that of Etna to my fancy seemed,
While in the minaretted distance gleamed
Purple and faint-green relics of the day,
And the warm air grew chill, and then I deemed
I saw a Shape dark-lined against the gray
Slowly approach my couch, but whence I could not say.

IV.

The starry beauty of its earnest gaze
The heavenly nature of that form revealed,
Seen through the dimness of the evening haze,
That magnified the figure it concealed:
It was the Genius who has trust to wield
The destinies of this our living hour,
Who wills not that the studious heart should shield
Itself from the requirements of his power,
Or seek a selfish rest, whatever tempests lour.

V.

Just at that moment, o'er the stony East
An arch of crimson radiance caught my sight,
That gradually expanded and increast,
Till the large moon arose -- and all was light!
Then I beheld advancing opposite
Another Shape, to which the Genius turned
As with a look of anger and despite,
While with a curious eagerness I burned,
And marked the Shape as one that much my weal concerned.

VI.

It was a female Form -- divinely tall,
Yet somewhat bowed, as by invisible weight,
A face whose pallor almost might appal,
Had not the charm of features been so great:
Her gathered amice, like the web of fate,
Was party-coloured, and her forehead bound
With such gold-work as fairies fabricate
In flowery cells, and stamp with letters round
That mock the learned sage and foolish eyes astound.

VII.

But passing by her without word or sign
The first came straight to me and looked awhile,
And laid his hand affectionately on mine,
And veiled his sternness with a gentle smile:
Making, by some unutterable wile,
The homely duties I could hardly prize,
And occupations I had left as vile,
Rise to my conscience like domestic ties,
For which my soul was bound all else to sacrifice.

VIII.

"Thou that art born into this favoured age,
So fertile in all enterprise of thought,
Bound in fresh mental conflicts to engage
The liberties for which your fathers fought, --
Be not thy spirit contemplation-fraught,
Musing and mourning! Thou must act and move,
Must teach your children more than ye were taught,
Brighten intelligence, disseminate love,
And, through the world around, make way to worlds above.

IX.

"The total surface of this sphered earth
Is now surveyed by philosophic eyes;
Nor East nor West conceals a secret worth --
In the wide Ocean no Atlantis lies:
Nations and men, that would be great and wise,
Thou knowest, can do no more than men have done;
No wondrous impulse, no divine surprise,
Can bring this planet nearer to the sun, --
Civilisation's prize no royal road has won.

X.

"So not to distant people, to far times,
Turn mind and heart, life's honest artisan!
Seek not miraculous virtues, mighty crimes,
Making a demon or a god of man:
Deem not that ever, wide as mind can scan,
He has been better in the mass than now,
A thing of wider intellectual span,
A creature of more elevated brow,
A being Hope has right more richly to endow."

XI.

Thus in clear language, not without reproof,
The Spirit of the Present, eagle-eyed,
Conjured me not to lie in thought aloof
From actual life, casting my fancy wide:
I know not what my tongue confused replied;
But she to whom my anxious looks appealed,
Now seated near in tutelary pride,
Spoke firmly for me, and would nowise yield
A cause she felt at heart, and on so fair a field.

XII.

She cried, "I am the Past!" and I inherit
Some rights and powers that thou canst not dethrone,
Therefore, unresting and untiring Spirit,
Thou shalt not make the Poet all thine own:
Time was when all men deemed that I alone
Was chartered his bright presence to possess,
That thou in heart and hand wert cold as stone,
And he would perish in thy rude caress,
Strong to insult and crush, but impotent to bless.

XIII.

"But things are changed: over the Poet's soul
No more my sway and dignities extend, --
Thy influences now his moods control,
If yet my lover, he is more thy friend:
But, since his errant footsteps hither tend,
Some little while by me he must remain,
Some little while beneath my memories bend,
And, when he hath full-stored his eager brain,
He shall return and be thy servitor again.

XIV.

"And surely here I claim but what I ought
In this my holiest place, my special shrine,
My Land of Egypt! where the human thought
Is linked to Chaos and the light divine,
Disparting darkness -- led from line to line
Of regal generations deep engraved,
Or richly wrought in hieroglyphic sign,
On Palaces, Tombs, Temples, that have saved
Their beauty through such storms as rocks have hardly braved.

XV.

"Here Fancy bows to Truth: Eldest of Time,
Child of the world's fresh morning, Egypt saw
These Pyramids rise gradually sublime,
And eras pass, whose records, as with awe,
Nature has willed from History to withdraw;
Yet learn, that on these stones has Abraham gazed,
These regions round acknowledged Joseph's law,
That obelisk from granite bed was raised,
Ere Moses in its shade sat and Jehovah praised.

XVI.

"This Nile was populous with floating life
For ages ere the Argo swept the seas,
Ere Helen woke the fires of Grecian strife
Thebes had beheld a hundred dynasties:
And when the Poet, whom all grandeurs please,
Named her the Hundred-gated and the Queen
Of earthly cities, she had reached the lees
Of her large cup of glory, and was seen
Image and type of what her perfect pride had been.

XVII.

"Here Greece, so often hailed progenitrix
Of mortal wisdom, nurse of ancient lore,
First skilled the ideal beautiful to fix
In plastic forms that shall not perish more,
Seems a pretender, who astutely bore
O'er his young locks a show of reverent grey, --
And Rome, whose greatness thou couldst once adore,
Appears, with all her circumstance of sway,
A mere familiar face, a thing of yesterday.

XVIII.

"Thus recognise that here the Past is all,
And Thou, the Present, nothing: no display
Of intellectual vigour can appal
Me, who can count the ages as a day:
But lest thy subtle words should lead astray
Him, who to me commits his heart awhile,
Depart to thine own kingdoms far away;
And we with grave delight will days beguile
Of wintry name, but blest with summer's blandest smile."

XIX.

So were we left, the Past and I together;
But how wise converse did itself unfold,
And how we breathed in that delicious weather
Whose balm was never hurt by heat or cold,
And how the scrolls of Nature were uprolled
Before me in that sacred company,
Are what can never in such words be told
As may seem worthy the reality:
Faint are the shades I give of what was given to me.

XX.

O Thou beneficent and bounteous stream!
Thou Patriarch River! on whose ample breast
We dwelt the time that full at once could seem
Of busiest travel and of softest rest:
No wonder that thy being was so blest
That gratitude of old to worship grew,
That as a living God Thou wert addrest,
And to itself the immediate agent drew
To one creative power the feelings only due.

XXI.

For in thy title and in Nature's truth
Thou art and makest Egypt: were thy source
But once arrested in its bubbling youth,
Or turned extravagant to some new course,
By a fierce crisis of convulsive force,
Egypt would cease to be -- the intrusive sand
Would smother its rich fields without remorse,
And scarce a solitary palm would stand
To tell, that barren vale was once the wealthiest land.

XXII.

Scarce with more certain order waves the Sun
His matin banners in the Eastern sky,
Than at the reckoned period are begun
Thy operations of fertility;
Through the long sweep thy bosom swelling high
Expands between the sandy mountain chains,
The walls of Libya and of Araby,
Till in the active virtue it contains
The desert bases sink and rise prolific plains.

XXIII.

See through the naked length no blade of grass,
No animate sign relieves the dismal strand,
Such it might seem our orb's first substance was,
Ere touched by God with generative hand;
Yet at one step we reach the teeming land
Lying fresh-green beneath the scorching sun,
As succulent as if at its command
It held all rains that fall, all brooks that run,
And this, O generous Nile! is thy vast benison.

XXIV.

Whence comest Thou, so marvellously dowered
As never other stream on earth beside?
Where are thy founts of being, thus empowered
To form a nation by their annual tide?
The charts are silent; history guesses wide;
Adventure from thy quest returns ashamed;
And each new age, in its especial pride,
Believes that it shall be as that one named,
In which to all mankind thy birth-place was proclaimed.

XXV.

Though Priests upon thy banks, mysterious Water!
Races of men in lofty knowledge schooled,
Though warriors, winning fame through shock and slaughter,
Sesostris to Napoleon, here have ruled:
Yet has the secret of thy sources fooled
The monarch's strength, the labours of the wise,
And, though the world's desire has never cooled,
Our practised vision little more descries
Than old Herodotus beheld with simple eyes.

XXVI.

And now in Egypt's late degraded day,
A venerating love attends thee still,
And the poor Fellah, from thee torn away,
Feels a strange yearning his rude bosom fill;
Like the remembered show of lake and hill,
That wrings the Switzer's soul, though fortune smile,
Thy mirage haunts him, uncontrolled by will,
And wealth or war in vain the heart beguile
That clings to its mud-hut and palms, beside the Nile.

XXVII.

The Palm! the Princess of the Sylvan race;
When islanded amid the level green,
Or charming the wild desert with her grace,
The only verdure of the sultry scene:
Ever, with simple majesty of mien,
No other growth of nature can assume,
She reigns -- and most when, in the evening sheen,
The stable column and the waving plume
Shade the delicious lights that all around allume.

XXVIII.

Yet this fair family's most lofty peers
Are dwarfed and stunted to the traveller's eye,
When by them its enormous bulk uprears
Some antique work of pomp or piety, --
Columns that may in height and girth defy
The sturdiest oaks that British glades adorn,
Or chesnuts on the slopes of Sicily, --
And walls that when, by time, to fragments torn,
Still look like towering cliffs by mountain-torrents worn.

XXIX.

'Twould seem as if some people that had held
Their pristine seat in lands of stony hill
Once from their ancient boundaries outswelled,
And took these vales to conquer and to till:
So, where the memory and tradition still
Of temples cut in living rocks remains,
This one Idea the artists' breasts might fill,
Who built amid the Nile's alluvial plains,
First to erect the Rocks and then work out the Fanes.

XXX.

Nor, when the architect's presiding thought
Stood out in noble form, solid and clear,
Was all the hieratic purpose wrought,
Or sacred objects their completion near:
For giant shapes of beauty and of fear
Must make each part for open worship fit,
And mystic language, known to priest and seer,
In very volumes on the walls be writ,
Whose sense is late revealed to searching modern wit.

XXXI.

Within -- without -- no little space is lost,
Though hardly obvious to a stranger eye;
With lavish labour and uncounted cost
Is overlaid each nook of masonry;
No base too deep -- no architrave too high
For these weird records of a nation's lore,
And early pride, that yearned to deify
The names and titles that their monarchs bore --
That what they loved and feared their children might adore.

XXXII.

Thus the Eternal Trinities, whose birth
Is in the primal reason of mankind,
Were mingled with the mighty of the earth,
To whom was given the trust to loose and bind
The destinies of nations: thus behind
The God, came close the great victorious King;
Till with the regal image were combined
All the dim thoughts and phantasies that cling
Round power, for power's own sake, as round a sacred thing.

XXXIII.

But walls, once stedfast as their base of rock,
Have crumbled into heaps o'er which we climb,
And graceless children leap from block to block,
The spawn of Nature on the graves of Time:
Into the tabernacle's night sublime,
Through the long fissures curious sunrays peep;
Say! if the Priests, who led this sacred mime,
Could loose their spicy cerements and the sleep
Of many thousand years, -- say, would they smile or weep?

XXXIV.

If that religion were a subtle wile
Dominion over feeble minds to keep,
If 'twere in truth a mime, they well might smile;
But if 'twere truth itself, they well might weep;
And why not truth itself? truth not less deep
For being fragmentary, -- though a gleam,
Not less a portion of the fires that steep
Mankind's brute matter in the heavenly stream,
And lead to waking life through mazy modes of dream.

XXXV.

Theirs was the sin to cumber faith with fear --
To tremble where they should have feared and loved;
To overlook the glory close and near,
And only reverence it in space removed;
Their pride of wisdom knew not it behoved
Man's mind to worship but man's heart still more,
Nor could conceive the doctrine thus approved,
When far away from Egypt and its lore,
Judaea's race, once free, the world's bright future bore.

XXXVI.

For right to mediate between God and man
The Art of Greece long combated in vain;
Far earlier here was shown the heavenly plan
How Nature's self could not that privilege gain;
So now organic life can scarce obtain
Its recognition of divinity, --
Past like the godhead of the Grecian fane:
And thus we know Ideas alone can be
Idols divine enough for man's high destiny.

XXXVII.

Who would not feel and satisfy this want,
Watching, as I, in Karnak's roofless halls,
Subnuvolar lights of evening sharply slant
Through pillared masses and on wasted walls?
Who would not learn, there is no form but palls
On the progressive spirit of mankind,
When here around in soulless sorrow falls
That which seemed permanence itself, designed
To rase the sense of death from out all human mind.

XXXVIII.

For near the temple ever lies the tomb,
The dwelling, not the dungeon, of the dead,
Where they abide in glorifying gloom,
In lofty chambers with rich colours spread,
Vast corridors, all carved and decorated
For entertainment of their ghostly lord,
When he may leave his alabaster bed,
And see, with pleasure earth could scarce afford,
These subterranean walls his power and wealth record.

XXXIX.

Often 'twas willed this splendour should be sealed
Not only from profane but priestly eyes,
That to no future gaze might be revealed
The secret palace where a Pharaoh lies,
Amid his world-enduring obsequies;
And though we, children of a distant shore,
Here search and scan, yet much our skill defies;
One chance the less, some grains of sand the more,
And never had been found that vault's mysterious door.

XL.

Not without cause the Persian's brutal hate
The regal corpse of Amasis profaned;
The Arabs' greed would hardly venerate
These halls of death, while hope of gain remained:
So much for ages with base passions stained;
But who are now the spoilers? We, even we;
Now the worst fiends of ruin are unchained,
That sons of science and civility
May bear the fragments home, beyond the midland sea.

XLI.

Soon will these miracles of eldest art
Be but as quarries hollowed in base stone;
Soon will the tablets, that might bear their part
In shedding light on tracts of time unknown
Be by caprice or avarice overthrown;
While worn by bitter frost of northern gloom
The obelisks will stand defaced and lone,
And god-like effigies, that had for room
The Nile and Desert, pine in narrow prison-gloom.

XLII.

But from that Theban Kingdom desolate
Benevolent winds, opposing the swift tide,
Impelled me onward, nor did once abate
Till the strong Cataract checked my vessel's pride:
How happy in that cool bright air to glide
By Esne, Edfou, Ombos! each in turn
A pleasure, and to other joys a guide; --
Labourless motion -- yet enough to earn
Syene's roseate cliffs -- Egypt's romantic bourn.

XLIII.

Tranquil above the rapids, rocks, and shoals,
The Tivoli of Egypt, Philae lies;
No more the frontier-fortress that controls
The rush of Ethiopian enemies, --
No more the Isle of Temples to surprise,
With Hierophantic courts and porticoes,
The simple stranger, but a scene where vies
Dead Art with living Nature to compose
For that my pilgrimage a fit and happy close.

XLIV.

There I could taste without distress of thought
The placid splendours of a Nubian night,
The sky with beautiful devices fraught
Of suns and moons and spaces of white light:
While on huge gateways rose the forms of Might,
Awful as when the People's heart they swayed,
And the grotesque grew solemn to my sight;
And earnest faces thronged the colonnade,
As if they wailed a faith forgotten or betrayed.

XLV.

There too, in calmer mood, I sent aflight
My mind through realms of marvel stretching far,
O'er Abyssinian Alps of fabled height,
O'er Deserts where no paths or guidance are,
Save when, by pilotage of some bright star,
As on the ocean, wends the caravan;
And then I almost mourned the mythic bar
That in old times along that frontier ran,
When gods came down to feast with Ethiopian man.

XLVI.

For I remember races numberless,
Whom still those latitudes in mystery fold,
And asked, what does the Past, my monitress,
For them within her genial bosom hold?
Where is for them the tale of history told?
How is their world advancing on its way?
How are they wiser, better, or more bold,
That they were not created yesterday?
Why are we life-taught men, why poor ephemerals they?

XLVII.

Present and Past are question'd there in vain,
And hang their heads unanswering: there in fee
The Future holds her absolute domain,
Empress of what a third of Earth shall be:
But will our generations live to see
Plenty through those unwatered regions reign, --
Science there dwell as with the white and free, --
To gentle thoughts subside the heated brain, --
And lawless tribes be bound in Order's sacred chain:

XLVIII.

May such things be? Ask him who hopes and prays
Rather than reasons. Good men have not quailed
Before the problem, and high justice weighs
The thoughts that prompted, not the deeds that failed.
What matter that the world has mocked and railed?
What matter that they perish, work undone?
The prescience of such souls has ever hailed,
Long ere the dawn, the coming of the sun,
And, may be, by such Faith the Light itself is won.





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