Poetry: Gebir

Overview
Walter Savage Landor’s Gebir (1798) is a visionary narrative poem set between Iberia and Egypt, written in stately, Miltonic blank verse. It follows the Spanish prince Gebir, who sails to conquer Egypt but is disarmed by the sight of the young queen Charoba. Around their tentative courtship Landor weaves prophecy, magic, and mythic detours, building a tragic meditation on power, trust, and the ruinous consequences of fear. The poem’s seven-book structure accommodates sweeping description, supernatural pageantry, and lyrical episodes that counterpoint the political plot with private longings and fatal misapprehensions.

Story
Gebir, prince of Boetica in Spain, sets out to subdue Egypt, partly to avenge ancestral wrongs. His martial confidence falters when he glimpses Charoba, a secluded queen whose innocence and grandeur arrest him. Determined to exchange conquest for alliance, he resolves to woo her and establish peace. His younger brother Tamar, sent ahead to reconnoiter the coast, is drawn instead into an otherworldly romance with a sea-nymph; the encounter entrances him, prefiguring a separation from mortal ties and hinting that human designs are fragile before elemental powers.

Within Egypt, Charoba vacillates between curiosity and dread. She is swayed by her Tyrian nurse Dalica, a hard, exile-hardened counselor who distrusts invaders and traffics in sorcery. Dalica feeds the queen’s anxieties with tales of treachery and oracular menace, turning a possible union into a nest of suspicions. While Gebir seeks legitimacy and understanding, court intrigue fuses with ritual spectacle: the Egyptian priesthood discloses subterranean wonders beneath the Nile, where embalmed kings and vast caverns seem to suspend time, instructing Gebir in the vanity of dominion and the mortality behind monuments.

Tamar’s strand grows more fateful. The nymph’s invitations promise metamorphosis and oblivion; at last he yields to the pull of the waters and vanishes into the sea’s dominion, a loss that shadows Gebir’s larger enterprise. As the brothers’ paths diverge, one drawn downward into the element, the other downward into history’s depths, Dalica advances a plot to protect Egypt through murder. She prepares a robe steeped in venom, urging Charoba to offer it as a gift to the foreign prince. Charoba’s conscience recoils, yet fear and the weight of counsel prevail. The poisoned present, meant to avert danger, becomes its instrument: the intended act backfires, recoiling upon the innocent and unfastening catastrophe within the palace.

The final movement closes in swift calamity. Love that might have healed enmity is overturned by superstition, misreading, and the residues of older hatreds. Death interrupts the projected marriage; vengeance and retribution flare; the forces glimpsed earlier, elemental waters, embalmed time, funerary darkness, seem to claim the living. Gebir’s hope of reconciling conquest with clemency collapses, and Egypt absorbs both lovers into its immemorial cycle of grandeur and lament.

Themes and Style
Landor opposes the transience of power to the permanence of art and ritual, staging kings and conquerors against stone and water that outlast them. Love is imagined as a possible bridge between nations, yet the poem insists on how easily fear and bad counsel corrupt goodwill. The supernatural is not mere ornament: prophecies, catacombs, and sea-nymphs literalize the undertows, historical, psychological, and elemental, that drag human intentions off course. The language is richly imagistic, laden with classical allusion and sculptural description, yet capable of sudden intimacy when it attends to Charoba’s innocence or Tamar’s enchantment. Gebir stands as an early Romantic experiment that blends epic architecture, tragic passion, and antiquarian reverie into a singular, hieratic fable of empire and desire.