This city, walled and thickly set With glittering mosque and minaret, Is Cairo, in whose gay bazaars The dreaming traveller first inhales The perfume of Arabian gales, And sees the fabulous earthen jars, Huge as were those wherein the maid Morgiana found the Forty Thieves Concealed in midnight ambuscade; And seeing, more than half believes The fascinating tales that run Through all the Thousand Nights and One, Told by the fair Scheherezade.
More strange and wonderful than these Are the Egyptian deities, Ammonn, and Emeth, and the grand Osiris, holding in his hand The lotus; Isis, crowned and veiled; The sacred Ibis, and the Sphinx; Bracelets with blue enamelled links; The Scarabee in emerald mailed, Or spreading wide his funeral wings; Lamps that perchance their night-watch kept O'er Cleopatra while she slept,— All plundered from the tombs of kings.
Turn, turn, my wheel! The human race,
Of every tongue, of every place,
Caucasian, Coptic, or Malay,
All that inhabit this great earth,
Whatever be their rank or worth,
Are kindred and allied by birth,
And made of the same clay.
O'er desert sands, o'er gulf and bay, O'er Ganges and o'er Himalay, Bird-like I fly, and flying sing, To flowery kingdoms of Cathay, And bird-like poise on balanced wing Above the town of King-te-tching, A burning town, or seeming so,— Three thousand furnaces that glow Incessantly, and fill the air With smoke uprising, gyre on gyre And painted by the lurid glare, Of jets and flashes of red fire.
As leaves that in the autumn fall, Spotted and veined with various hues, Are swept along the avenues, And lie in heaps by hedge and wall, So from this grove of chimneys whirled To all the markets of the world, These porcelain leaves are wafted on,— Light yellow leaves with spots and stains Of violet and of crimson dye, Or tender azure of a sky Just washed by gentle April rains, And beautiful with celadon.
Nor less the coarser household wares,— The willow pattern, that we knew In childhood, with its bridge of blue Leading to unknown thoroughfares; The solitary man who stares At the white river flowing through Its arches, the fantastic trees And wild perspective of the view; And intermingled among these The tiles that in our nurseries Filled us with wonder and delight, Or haunted us in dreams at night.
And yonder by Nankin, behold! The Tower of Porcelain, strange and old, Uplifting to the astonished skies Its ninefold painted balconies, With balustrades of twining leaves, And roofs of tile, beneath whose eaves Hang porcelain bells that all the time Ring with a soft, melodious chime; While the whole fabric is ablaze With varied tints, all fused in one Great mass of color, like a maze Of flowers illumined by the sun.
Turn, turn, my wheel! What is begun
At daybreak must at dark be done,
To-morrow will be another day;
To-morrow the hot furnace flame
Will search the heart and try the frame,
And stamp with honor or with shame
These vessels made of clay.
Cradled and rocked in Eastern seas, The islands of the Japanese Beneath me lie; o'er lake and plain The stork, the heron, and the crane Through the clear realms of azure drift, And on the hillside I can see The villages of Imari, Whose thronged and flaming workshops lift Their twisted columns of smoke on high, Cloud cloisters that in ruins lie, With sunshine streaming through each rift, And broken arches of blue sky.
All the bright flowers that fill the land, Ripple of waves on rock or sand, The snow on Fusiyama's cone, The midnight heaven so thickly sown With constellations of bright stars, The leaves that rustle, the reeds that make A whisper by each stream and lake, The saffron dawn, the sunset red, Are painted on these lovely jars; Again the skylark sings, again The stork, the heron, and the crane Float through the azure overhead, The counterfeit and counterpart Of Nature reproduced in Art.