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

240
A ringed enclosure marked the slope, and there
the parish young lay, and the wives and mothers.
The corpses of the menfolk lay elsewhere,
it’s falling rock killed some, the sea killed others.
It was ill-tended, was that holy ground;
and yet the gate implied a thoughtful funder,
for it was arched and amply planned all round,
as though for the broad highway to pass under.
And there the midwife of the age desisted.
He listened; grave-like silence, undispelled;
no hymn, no sound of service being held;
he seized hold of the latch; the lock resisted. —
God’s little house was shut; no lesson read
by deacon in the choir or Word expounded;
he climbed the hedge by which the yard was bounded;
there too, deserted; — where had folk all fled?
He listened; torpid air scarce stirred in slumber;
but something pierced the silence by and by;
he heard a voice yell out and a reply;
at times a name was called, at times a number.
It came from past the church. His course was set.
It sounded near; he climbed the hedge-partition;
there he stood high and free; his eye was met
below the hillside by an apparition.
The red marquee stood where the stream ran bending
its course around a nearby spit of land.
The parish — men and women, young attending —
had gathered in a group and there they stand.
They looked more like the dead than like the living;
their temples hollow, eyes ringed round with grey;
their voices’ hoarseness cried that unforgiving
starvation was the force there holding sway.
It was the old, old song that brooks no bridle;
a bad year, then a winter without bread;
a spring with empty mouths and hands kept idle, —
then summertime, of sickness and the dead.
Then an appeal that failed, a fruitless call,
then poor-relief with niggard minds to stock it,
a cautious fumble into purse and pocket —
a meagre mite for those who lacked for all.
A man sat by the steps in city vesture,
a meerschaum hanging from his mouth’s left side;
an old tobacco-pouch, gold braid applied,
swung from his jacket button with each gesture.
He seemed a man in charge of operations;
wrote notes upon his knee, read, called aloud