John Keats

Sonnet To The Nile

Son of the old Moon-mountains African! Chief of the Pyramid and Crocodile! We call thee fruitful, and that very while A desert fills our seeing's inward span: Nurse of swart nations since the world began, Art thou so fruitful? or dost thou beguile Such men to honour thee, who, worn with toil, Rest for a space 'twixt Cairo and Decan? O may dark fancies err! They surely do; 'Tis ignorance that makes a barren waste Of all beyond itself. Thou dost bedew Green rushes like our rivers, and dost taste The pleasant sunrise. Green isles hast thou too, And to the sea as happily dost haste. 'This sonnet seems to have been composed on the 4th of February 1818; for in writing to his brothers (Life, Letters &c. , 1848, Volume 1, page 98) on the 16th of that month, a Monday, Keats says -- "The Wednesday before last, Shelley, Hunt and I, wrote each a sonnet on the river Nile: some day you shall read them all. " Lord Houghton appended Keats's sonnet to the letter, together with Leigh Hunt's, and Shelley's "Ozymandias. "' ~ Poetical Works of John Keats, ed. H. Buxton Forman, Crowell publ. 1895.