Classic Poem

An Elegy at Helouan

Night in the secret East unlocks her doors;
Quickly the leaden-coloured sluice she pours,
Surging, the arabesque of sunset drowns,
The whips and fans the scarlet scarves and crowns,
The parting sun with fiery pencil scrawls
Upon the enamelled heaven. Full she falls
On the old and awful Desert, blind and dead,
With dews and rains for mockery idly fed,
Between the dun hills and the shining river
Who lags his far-fetched burden to deliver;
An urn of meditative dusk she spills
Into the vessel of the Arabian hills,
And blurs the melancholy Pyramids:
My gazing eyes grow weak to lift their lids.

This way perhaps the swarthy slaveries went,
Myriad-footed, creeping at the rope,
A monstrous man-compacted instrument,
Sweet lives made misery for an idle hope
Of sovereignty in death, to heave one pile
A little higher than the rest, awhile
Longer defer the inevitable dust,
And build Not yet, not yet! against Thou must .

And look, his grave is fly-blown by the mob,
Eager to scan, to desecrate, to rob;
The secret of his sepulchre proclaimed
To every curious alien unashamed;
And, with his vessels and his gems, himself
Obscenely pilloried on a showroom shelf!

Happier than this the unregarded slave
Who dropped to freedom in a nameless grave;
Happier the poor whose cemetery fills
Yon bay among the brown Arabian hills,
Each with a pair of tutelary stones
Presiding, head and feet, to watch his bones:
And when the suns that suck the Desert's veins,
When brush of winds and quiet biting rains,
Which seem to do no hurt and never spare,
Disperse the weak memorial on the air,
Better to know thy former human heart
And all that loved laborious mortal part
Drift from the mouldering ark to meet the sand
And pass incorporate with thy native land!
The stone, the tree, the fountain — these shall be
A quiet anchor for the soul of thee
Riding the harbour-calms at home and free!

Dim as the card-built cities of a dream
The sprawling hovels of the hamlet gleam;
Quick through the dusk the starry needles quiver
Upon the dun hills and the shoaling river.

An Elegy at Helouan

Night in the secret East unlocks her doors;
Quickly the leaden-coloured sluice she pours,
Surging, the arabesque of sunset drowns,
The whips and fans the scarlet scarves and crowns,
The parting sun with fiery pencil scrawls
Upon the enamelled heaven. Full she falls
On the old and awful Desert, blind and dead,
With dews and rains for mockery idly fed,
Between the dun hills and the shining river
Who lags his far-fetched burden to deliver;
An urn of meditative dusk she spills
Into the vessel of the Arabian hills,
And blurs the melancholy Pyramids:
My gazing eyes grow weak to lift their lids.

This way perhaps the swarthy slaveries went,
Myriad-footed, creeping at the rope,
A monstrous man-compacted instrument,
Sweet lives made misery for an idle hope
Of sovereignty in death, to heave one pile
A little higher than the rest, awhile
Longer defer the inevitable dust,
And build Not yet, not yet! against Thou must .

And look, his grave is fly-blown by the mob,
Eager to scan, to desecrate, to rob;
The secret of his sepulchre proclaimed
To every curious alien unashamed;
And, with his vessels and his gems, himself
Obscenely pilloried on a showroom shelf!

Happier than this the unregarded slave
Who dropped to freedom in a nameless grave;
Happier the poor whose cemetery fills
Yon bay among the brown Arabian hills,
Each with a pair of tutelary stones
Presiding, head and feet, to watch his bones:
And when the suns that suck the Desert's veins,
When brush of winds and quiet biting rains,
Which seem to do no hurt and never spare,
Disperse the weak memorial on the air,
Better to know thy former human heart
And all that loved laborious mortal part
Drift from the mouldering ark to meet the sand
And pass incorporate with thy native land!
The stone, the tree, the fountain — these shall be
A quiet anchor for the soul of thee
Riding the harbour-calms at home and free!

Dim as the card-built cities of a dream
The sprawling hovels of the hamlet gleam;
Quick through the dusk the starry needles quiver
Upon the dun hills and the shoaling river.