| |
| THEY glare,—those stony eyes! | |
| That in the fierce sun-rays | |
| Showered from these burning skies, | |
| Through untold centuries | |
| Have kept their sleepless and unwinking gaze. | 5 |
| |
| Since what unnumbered year | |
| Hast thou kept watch and ward, | |
| And o’er the buried Land of Fear | |
| So grimly held thy guard? | |
| No faithless slumber snatching, | 10 |
| Still couched in silence brave, | |
| Like some fierce hound long watching | |
| Above her master’s grave. | |
| |
| No fabled shape art thou! | |
| On that thought-freighted brow | 15 |
| And in those smooth weird lineaments we find, | |
| Though traced all darkly, even now | |
| The relics of a mind: | |
| And gather dimly thence | |
| A vague, half-human sense,— | 20 |
| The strange and sad intelligence | |
| That sorrow leaves behind. | |
| |
| Dost thou in anguish thus | |
| Still brood o’er Œdipus? | |
| And weave enigmas to mislead anew, | 25 |
| And stultify the blind | |
| Dull heads of human kind, | |
| And inly make thy moan | |
| That, mid the hated crew, | |
| Whom thou so long couldst vex, | 30 |
| Bewilder, and perplex, | |
| Thou yet couldst find a subtler than thine own? | |
| |
| Even now, methinks that those | |
| Dark, heavy lips, which close | |
| In such a stern repose, | 35 |
| Seem burdened with some thought unsaid, | |
| And hoard within their portals dread | |
| Some fearful secret there, | |
| Which to the listening earth | |
| She may not whisper forth, | 40 |
| Not even to the air! | |
| |
| Of awful wonders hid | |
| In yon dread Pyramid, | |
| The home of magic fears; | |
| Of chambers vast and lonely, | 45 |
| Watched by the Genii only, | |
| Who tend their masters’ long-forgotten biers, | |
| And treasures that have shone | |
| On cavern-walls alone, | |
| For thousand, thousand years. | 50 |
| |
| Those sullen orbs wouldst thou eclipse, | |
| And ope those massy tomb-like lips,— | |
| Many a riddle thou couldst solve, | |
| Which all blindly men revolve. | |
| |
| Would she but tell! She knows | 55 |
| Of the old Pharaohs; | |
| Could count the Ptolemies’ long line; | |
| Each mighty myth’s original hath seen, | |
| Apis, Anubis,—ghosts that haunt between | |
| The bestial and divine,— | 60 |
| (Such, he that sleeps in Philæ,—he that stands | |
| In gloom, unworshipped, ’neath his rock-hewn fane,— | |
| And they who, sitting on Memnonian sands, | |
| Cast their long shadows o’er the desert plain:) | |
| Hath marked Nitocris pass, | 65 |
| And Ozymandias | |
| Deep-versed in many a dark Egyptian wile,— | |
| The Hebrew boy hath eyed | |
| Cold to the master’s bride; | |
| And that Medusan stare hath frozen the smile | 70 |
| Of all her love and guile, | |
| For whom the Cæsar sighed, | |
| And the world-loser died,— | |
| The darling of the Nile. | |
| |
