Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Poems of Places: An Anthology in 31 Volumes.
Africa: Vol. XXIV. 1876–79. | | | | Egypt, Nubia, and Abyssinia: Nile, the River | | The Nile | | Lucretius (c 99–55 B.C.) |
| | (From The Nature of Things, Book VI)
Translated by J. M. Good
THE NILE now calls us, pride of Egypt’s plains: | |
| Sole stream on earth its boundaries that o’erflows | |
| Punctual, and scatters plenty. When the year | |
| Now glows with perfect summer, leaps its tide | |
| Broad o’er the champaign, for the north-wind now, | 5 |
| The Etesian breeze, against its mouth direct | |
| Blows with perpetual winnow; every surge | |
| Hence loiters slow, the total current swells, | |
| And wave o’er wave its loftiest bank surmounts. | |
| For that the fixed monsoon that now prevails | 10 |
| Flows from the cold stars of the northern pole | |
| None e’er can doubt; while rolls the Nile adverse | |
| Full from the south, from realms of torrid heat, | |
| Haunts of the Ethiop-tribes; yet far beyond | |
| First bubbling, distant, o’er the burning line. | 15 |
| Then ocean, haply, by the undevious breeze | |
| Blown up its channel, heaves with every wave | |
| Heaps of high sands, and dams its wonted course: | |
| Whence narrower, too, its exit to the main, | |
| And with less force the tardy stream descends. | 20 |
| Or, towards its fountain, ampler rains, perchance, | |
| Fall, as the Etesian fans, now wide unfurled, | |
| Ply the big clouds perpetual from the north | |
| Far o’er the red equator; where, condensed, | |
| Ponderous, and low, against the hills they strike, | 25 |
| And shed their treasures o’er the rising flood. | |
| Or, from the Ethiop-mountains, the bright sun | |
| Now full matured, with deep dissolving ray | |
| May melt the agglomerate snows, and down the plains | |
| Drive them, augmenting, hence, the incipient stream. | 30 | | | |
|
|
