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

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flag in black-white funeral guise,
woolly grubs of great potential
can’t hatch as song’s butterflies.
They can spin their silk, but shortly
die in the cocoon, bound tautly. —
In the hour of triumph, shipwrack.
Prussian sword turns Prussian whip-crack.
There’s no kind of elevation
in resolving an equation.
No achievement worth the prizing
since the time when the uprising
of a people fine and free
changed to staff-machinery,
whittled down by shrewd devising, —
since von Moltke’s pragmatising
killed the struggle’s poesy.
Thus demonic is the might
pledged to worldly domination:
sphinx-like, hoarding its own light,
killed by its own obfuscation.
Cypher-triumph meets its fate.
Modern winds have blown of late;
they will, like the sand-storm’s lashing,
send the race of idols crashing.
Bismarck and those other buffers
will on history’s throne look duffers,
just like Memnon’s stumps of column,
songless when the sun shines on ‘em.
But as we Khedive-invited
guests, our trip through death’s world ended,
midst festivities well-lighted
met the dawning age portended, —
yes, as we, flag fluttering,
hailed, to world-wide chorusing,
the canal’s inauguration,
and as we from Suez strand
caught a glimpse of promised land, —
so the spirit’s expectation
of canals to be constructed
shall, as on a world-wide tour,
by chorales and hymns conducted,
by the glow of Beauty’s brand,
set sail for the dawn’s allure,
steering for the Promised Land.
It’s for Beauty that we hunger.
Bismarck’s just a science-monger.