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Title: The Obelisk In Luxor
Author: Theophile Gautier [
More Titles by Gautier]
Where the wasted columns brood,
Lonely sentinel stand I,
In eternal solitude
Facing all infinity.
Dumb, with beauty unendowed,
To the horizon limitless
Spreads earth's desert like a shroud
Stained by yellow suns that press.
While above it, blue and clean,
Is another desert cast--
Sky where cloud is never seen,
Pure, implacable, and vast.
And the Nile's great water-course
Glazed with leaden pellicle
Wrinkled by the river-horse
Gleameth dead, unlustreful.
All about the flaming isles,
By a turbid water spanned,
Hot, rapacious crocodiles
Swoon and sob upon the sand.
Perching motionless, alone,
Ibis, bird of classic fame,
From a carven slab of stone
Reads the moon-god's sacred name.
Jackals howl, hyenas grin,
Famished hawks descend and cry.
Down the heavy air they spin,
Commas black against the sky.
These the sounds of solitude,
Where the sphinxes yawn and doze,
Dull and passionless of mood,
Weary of their endless pose.
Child of sand's reflected shine,
And of sun-rays fiercely bent,
Is there ennui like to thine,
Spleen of luminous Orient?
Thou it was cried "Halt!" of yore
To satiety of kings.
Thou hast crushed me more and more
With thine awful weight of wings.
Here no zephyr of the sea
Wipes the tears from skies that fill.
Time himself leans wearily
On the palaces long still.
Naught shall touch the features terse
Of this dull, eternal spot.
In this changing universe,
Only Egypt changeth not!
When the ennui never ends,
And I yearn a friend to hold,
I've the fellahs, mummies, friends,
Of the dynasties of old.
I behold a pillar pale,
Or a chipped Colossus note,
Watch a distant, gleaming sail
Up and down the Nile afloat.
Oh, to seek my brother's side,
In a Paris wondrous, grand,
With his stately form to bide,
In the public place to stand!
For he looks on living men,
And they scan his pictures wrought
By an hieratic pen,
To be read by vision-thought.
Fountains fair as amethyst
On his granite lightly pour
All their irisated mist.
He is growing young once more.
Ah! yet he and I had birth
From Syene's veins of red.
But I keep my spot of earth.
He is living. I am dead.
[The end]
Theophile Gautier's poem: Obelisk In Luxor
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