Upper Egypt and Ethiopia
- Frith, Francis

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Commentary

Though not strictly a photopoetic book, Francis Frith’s Upper Egypt and Ethiopia (1862) contains an original poem by Frith that is in dialogue with the concluding photograph of the volume. Frith had a lifelong interest in poetry, read voraciously as a child, and often wrote, and his commentaries on his various travels in the East often invoke, or allude to, the great poets. Frith wrote ‘Lines, written after parting from a young lady, then suffering from illness,’ when he was seventeen, and a volume of his poetry, The Autobiography of a Soul, and Other Poems, was published posthumously in 1900. It is perhaps fitting, then, that Upper Egypt, Frith’s final photographic book of the East, concludes with a poem by Frith, paired with the Columns of Soleb, Ethiopia:

O Ruin! thou has empire in all lands
Of this fast-changing globe; and even the sea
Casts up thy spoils on her remotest sands.
There is no angel of God’s ministry
To whom he yieldeth more than unto thee!
And if the deathless soul itself could fall,
To other than the Eternal, it would be
To Thee, dread power! who, ‘neath thy shadowy pall
Life, beauty, love, ambition – gatherest all!

Frith provides the reader with a poetic monument to complement his own photographic memorialisation of the ruined columns, his poem acts as a fragment itself, perhaps excised from a longer work.

Book Details

Author: Frith, Francis
Title: Upper Egypt and Ethiopia
Publication Year: 1862
Poets Featured: Frith, Francis
Photographers Featured: Frith, Francis
Photographic process: Albumen prints

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