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

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Written shortly after the assassination in 1865, during peace negotiations between the Great
Powers following the defeat of Denmark by Germany over Slesvig/Holstein. The place names
refer to outrages committed by those same Great Powers against smaller nations. Goldbraided
gang: the diplomatic corps; magnates in cotton etc, England, France and Germany;
Aurea Domus, Nero’s ostentatious palace in Rome.
THE EPIC BRAND
To the accomplices
My folk, my wretched land, my northern home,
where sun is screened by snow-fields, peaks that lower,
the foot forbade, by rock and fjord, to roam —
soul’s wing constrained by yet more base a power, —
for you I sing a melancholy song,
perhaps my last, as bard of Norway, granted;
for there’s no poet who would sing for long
once at the nation’s grave the hymn’s been chanted.
Plague, even now, is rife. A corpse I see;
vast as an Ymir carcase, there it stretches
and spreads a pestilence on firth and lea,
infecting both the mighty and poor wretches.
Use all of Norway’s flags to make its pall!
Today’s youth, help to drown it in the waters!
Where Earl faced Jomsborg’s men in battle’s brawl
the giant corpse may best find burial quarters.
No longer cling, you fools, to what has perished,
as Harald clung to Snefrid’s corpse so long;
think not, like him, you glimpse red cheeks once cherished
and hear beneath the shroud the heart beat strong.
For what is dead no lie restores to living.
For what is dead must to the dark, alone.
The dead have but one function, that of giving
themselves as sustenance to seeds new sown.
And it is many years since your beginning
to play this living lie with something dead;
it is your crime of youth, your adult sinning,
and from it flows the plague that lies ahead.
The doom must fall, though, with discrimination;
it must assail with ten-fold force all those
that head the mustered people’s foremost rows; —
but hundred-fold the bards of this your nation.
For we have pandered with a line extinct,
and rouged the corpse of times too great to perish,
hung up gigantic arms with dwarf-like relish,
to lend our memory’s hall a festive tinct.