To the Nile - by John Keats

 

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.

 

“To the Nile” is a Petrarchan sonnet composed by the Late-Romantic poet John Keats. Keats said to have composed this sonnet in a friendly competition with his fellow Romantics Leigh Hunt and P B Shelly. A Petrarchan sonnet has an octave rhyming abbaabba and a sestet rhyming cdcdcd. The Volta or the turn of the line of thought occurs from the octave to the sestet.  In this sonnet also line number 9 marks a change of thought: Initially the poetic persona thinks of the Nile as a holy/mysterious river that beguiled the travellers, but from line 9 onwards he begins to think of it as an ordinary river similar to the ones he sees in his own country.

In Greek mythology Nilus is considered the god of the Nile River. The poem traces the course of the Nile from the legendary sub-Saharan Moon Mountains to the Mediterranean Sea, and how it turns some parts of Egypt into fertile oases within a desert. The poem is written in the second person. The poetic persona addresses a personified Nile directly as a sentient being.

In the octave the poet acknowledges the ancient fame of and the reverence paid to the river and calls it “Son of the Old Moon-Mountains African!”  The poetic techniques used here are inversion and personification.  In addition, this is also an invocation to a supernatural power in the form of the Nile. Then in the second line, the Nile is invoked as the “Chief of the Pyramid and Crocodile.” The blocks of limestone and marble that were used to build the great pyramids in Egypt said to have been transported from their quarries to the present site using the Nile. And the Pyramids and the civilization that built them are located close to the river. Hence, it is the Chief of the Pyramid.

On the banks of the Nile one finds huge crocodiles. In addition, ancient Egyptians worshipped a crocodile-headed god who was related to the mummification process and death in general. The pyramids are thought to be the tombs of the ancient Egyptian pharaohs. Hence, the Nile is “Chief of … Crocodile!” At a surface level, the poet creates bathos through the phrase “Chief of the Pyramid and Crocodile” by juxtaposing the pyramids with crocodiles.

The Son, the Chief, and the Nurse are references to the different roles of the Nile. The Nile is both a man and a woman – therefore, androgynous.

The octave contains a series of contradictions: An old mountain dedicated to a virgin goddess had given birth to a son; the Nile is the chief of both the Pyramids and Crocodiles and it is also a river in the middle of a desert.

In the third and fourth lines the poet refers to the first contradiction - “We call thee fruitful and that very while/ A desert fills our seeing's inward span.” Fruitfulness and barrenness, two extremes, exist side by side as the Nile flows through a vast desert. Once a year the Nile floods depositing rich loamy mud on the banks of the river, making them ideal for agriculture. Today this has changed with the construction of many dams along the river like the Aswan. The Egyptian god Hapi is associated with flooding of the river, thus bringing fertility and fruitfulness.

According to Egyptian mythology, the Nile itself is considered as a symbol of fertility. When the Egyptian god Osiris was killed and his body parts were scattered by his brother Seth, his genitals were supposed to have been thrown into the river to be eaten by a crocodile so that his wife would not be able to resurrect him.

In the next line the River Nile is invoked as the nurse for the Africans – another image of fertility. Yet the poet immediately questions the truth value of his own invocation with the question “[a]rt thou so fruitful?”

The first question is followed by another rhetorical question: “or dost thou beguile/Such men to honour thee, who, worn with toil,/Rest for a space 'twixt Cairo and Decan?” Here the poet is questioning the famed fruitfulness/nurturing qualities of the river. He is wondering whether people have called the river fruitful only in comparison to what lay on either side of it and because it offered "rest for a space 'twixt Cairo and Decan." He is asking whether the river had fooled the various nations of people who travelled between Cairo and Decan (Deccan?) – probably the travellers of the ancient Silk Rout – into worshiping it by assuming a mysterious supernatural appearance. At this point, it is possible that Keats may be referring to the numerous ancient temples dedicated to Osiris along the River which were worshipped by travellers, too.

The poetic persona begins the sestet with a prayer or a deeply felt wish to the Nile and/or the gods of Egypt to make his dark thought and doubts about the fruitfulness of the Nile false – He says: “O may dark fancies err!” Then he affirms with certainty that his fancies were indeed wrong with the short phrase “They surely do.” Here, Keats is critical of his imagination or ‘negative capability’ as he calls it. Negative capability, according to Keats is ‘when man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.’

Next, Keats says that “'Tis ignorance that makes a barren waste/ Of all beyond itself.”  Here, Keats might be talking about our ignorance about the Nile or things and people in general. Ignorant people assume everything beyond what is familiar to be a barren waste. In the same way, the Europeans of Keats’ age had either romanticized or demonized the rest of the world. Keats strives to see a similarity between the rivers of England and the Nile – In sociology this kind of thinking is called “cultural relativism.” But this attempt to positively evaluate the Nile in comparison to English rivers, too, smacks of the European superiority complex as the Nile as the longest river of the world is far superior to a river like the Avon, one of the longest rivers in England. In the same way, if one is to compare the European and African civilizations from a cultural relativist point of view, then, one might be doing injustice to something that is much older.

In the last four lines, the poet looks at the river from aesthetic point of view and describes its journey to the sea using typically sensuous Keatsean language.

In conclusion, Keats seems to suggest that whatever or wherever we are, in the end everything has the same end.