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

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up in the pulpit Brand was heard to mutter,
though what his prayer was, nobody could know.
His prayer was brief, then he addressed them clearly:
“Remember, man lives not by bread alone;
but if your body’s needs are met, those merely,
you are provided not with bread but stone.
And if you can suppress your hunger solely
with gifts that can be put into your hands,
then you’ve no link with God, no bridge expands
connecting you with everything that’s holy.
“I stood this morning high up on the mountain
and watched you crowd all roads to church, below,
I thought then you had Him in mind, the fountain
of all that raises, frees us mid life’s woe.
I thought life here still went at its old speed
amongst you, with no mental stimulation;
and yet it raised me, that you felt the need
to clutch at Him, as life-raft of salvation.
“How swift, the fear one’s Maker has forgotten,
how easy to believe God’s turned away,
when neither sun nor stars rise re-begotten,
where there is neither night nor any day,
when all is grey on grey, all things unchanging,
the need today as yesterday, the same,
however far through time your eye goes ranging,
the same old picture in the same old frame.
“When there is nothing rising or declining,
when life weighs down like murky overcast,
when there’s no anger and there’s no repining,
when sentence is accepted just as passed,
when there’s no joy or terror to relieve it
and cast some light and shade on life’s dull pace,
the soul is tempted to collapse, believe it
has been struck out of God’s great book of grace.
[The manuscript breaks off here]
Ibsen struggled for nearly a year with the epic Brand and then in 1865, reported to his friend
Bjørnson the remarkable progress he was making with ‘Brand’ in its dramatic form.
Ymir, the first living creature, a giant; the maggots that emerged from his rotting corpse
were transformed by the gods into dwarfs destined to live and work underground;
Earl/Jomsburg: Earl Haakon of Norway defeated at Ålesund a powerful invasion force of
Vikings based, since 960 AD, on Jomsburg, at the mouth of the river Oder; Snefrid, the
Finnish wife of King Harald Haarfagre; under-stringing, to resonate in sympathy with the
plucked strings above; Egir, the sea-god; his steed a riddling reference to a ship; giant
petrified i.e. when overtaken by sunlight; tongued device, the leading edge of a flag with two
triangles removed, to resemble the jaws and tongue of a dragon; Fenris, the great wolf which
devoured the sun thus inaugurating a winter, many years long, during which human society