THE COLLECTED POEMS OF HENRIK IBSEN Translated by John ...

19
Here may the heart find such content
Amid the raging storm;
Here Nature’s visage can present
My breast in mirrored form,
An image of my given doom:
No peace in life nor in the tomb,
No peace eternally! —
Hulder, another dangerously seductive spirit, a mountain-haunting enchantress identifiable
by her tail.
The first of Ibsen’s poems to achieve print.
IN THE AUTUMN
Summertime’s songsters forsake now the glading; —
Where once their melodies rang from the boughs,
Autumn already so plaintively soughs
Stirring the last of their yellow-leaved lading.
Here where the carpet of blossom was blent,
Jewelling the fragrant green sward with its treasure,
Summer’s farewell sounds a tremulous measure,
Straw for its strings now, — a lyric lament!
Lily, why left you your stem here, but bending,
Bared of its leafage, — where hence did you flee?
O, you’ll return in the springtime-to-be,
On the kind angel of summer attending!
Rose, from whose beauteous chalice would trill
Joy’s dulcet language that whispered so fairly,
Thorns are the memory left with us merely, —
— Wounding, but — ah, — but I love you so, still! —
Many a seed from the spring-time plantations
We have seen ripen, its fruitfulness flaunt; —
O, but there’s many a plot that can vaunt
Nought but the husks of its high expectations.
Summer! too swift for the south you were bound,
Hope soon departed, too brief was its hour, —
Ah, and the mourner is left with no flower
Modestly gracing the grave’s hallowed mound.
Yet, midst the graves there is one bloom remaining
Living in all of its loveliness still, —
One that the Autumn’s cold blast could not kill; —
O, why need heart, then, prolong its complaining! —
— Memory we call it, — see, still it can bring
Hope from the rigours of hibernation, —
Bind it in wreaths for the Past’s celebration,
It will give solace, presaging a Spring! —