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

205
But knowing prophets
flocked there in force.
With day-time profits
plus night’s to scoff — it’s
the thing, of course.
Legend has it that King Olav (the Saint) forced a reluctant troll to build a church for him.
Ibsen attacks the Norwegian propensity to strike a compromise between the forces of light
and darkness.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN’S MURDER
Out there in the west a shot was fired,
and it shook Europe up, the bang.
Heigh! Look how suddenly life inspired
every one of the gold-braided gang!
Old Europe, so orderly, patently right,
with rules for each rung on the scale,
with honour unblemished, clean and bright,
with proper scorn for what’s black-not-white, —
you turned quite remarkably pale.
Now unicorns, eagles are stamped on wax
and creatures of every form;
the packet-boat swings as its cable slacks;
despatches arrive in a swarm.
Magnates in cotton, ‘gloire’s’ proud son,
the mob from the land of lies,
they grabbed for the palm-frond of peace as one,
then sounded the single shot from a gun,
and he fell there, one person dies.
And then you took fright. Old Europe’s way,
was that, then, so right and true?
A Prussian venture, at Dybbøl, say,
the world had been witness to.
No raven pecks at a brother raven; —
remember the Poles and that row,
the English siege before Copenhagen?
The war-tombs at Flensborg? Was “Sønderborg” graven?
But why grow indignant now?
That crimson rose there whose flowers shock
and frighten you here at home,
our Europe supplied the grafting-stock,
the West its luxuriant loam.
You planted as seedling that thriving stand
that reddens the shores of the West; —
it’s you who tied with your own fair hand
the knightly sash of the martyr’s band
on Abraham Lincoln’s breast.