“Nil va Rim” (The Nile and Rome)
“Nil va Rim” is a poem of six parts written in 1935. In the first part the lyric hero, by a night lamp, pictures history: the past, present and future appear before his eyes. The second and third parts are devoted to ancient Egypt: the Nile flows with the slaves’ tears, the pharaoh regards himself as master, and the pyramids and statues are the hardened expression of the sweat and wrath the slaves shed. The fourth and fifth parts turn to Rome: the hungry, ragged people are humiliated, people are forced to fight for entertainment in the circus, and the crowd applauds. The sixth part recalls the revolt raised by Spartacus. The textbook explains the point of the title: the pharaohs of Egypt considered themselves gods on earth, while the Roman empire enslaved peoples; in both, human life was held cheap. In the refrain, repeated twice (in the third and sixth parts), the lyric hero proclaims himself the undying descendant of the slaves and rebels. The line comparing the darkness of the night with the brightness of the moon means that the heavier the oppression, the clearer the hope of freedom. As the textbook stresses, the 23-year-old poet takes the pain of slavery’s victims as the pain of his own people.
Give each of the six parts of the poem a one-line theme (for example, 1 – picturing history) and write them in a table. Then explain in two sentences the meaning of the refrain’s being repeated twice.