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

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Shall we join the fun together?
Well, who knows, dear lady whether
doves will bring the card? We’ll see.
Till then I wear gloves — kid-leather —
in my chamber’s privacy;
till then I shall seek allayment
as a poet garbed in vellum;
that will stir the good-folk’s venom,
“heathen’s” sure to be my payment;
mobs are my abomination,
I fear dregs, contamination,
I shall bide time’s slow rotation
in my spotless wedding raiment.
And with these last words, goodbye!
Fare you well, balloon! Now fly!
Air’s the poet’s region, really; —
steer due north and land as nearly
as you can to Mælarstranden;
that’s convenient to land on,
Telemark is much too high!
In the basket struts Imp Swanker.
Let me not have long to wait
to be told he, with his freight —
light-weight verse, light thoughts, no rancour —
has, at Normalm, dropped his anchor!
During the summer of 1869 Ibsen had stayed with the Limnells, a Swedish couple, at their
house “Lyran” on Lake Mælaren before he set out for Suez. He wrote en route from
Dresden, where he felt “besieged” by German society as Paris was, at that date, by the
German army; hence the conceit of sending out his letter by balloon — one such from Paris
had landed in Telemark — and the linking of Egypt and Germany as states with no soul and
no individuality; Ibsen is castigating the militaristic brutality of Prussian influence which
had, in his view, perverted Germany’s initial aspirations to achieve unity and a national
identity — an influence manifested in the bombastic architectural re-planning of the capital;
Peter Wessel, the Norwegian Nelson, later entitled Tordenskjold, destroyed with vastly
inferior numbers a Swedish fleet in 1716; the prisoner at Bender, King Charles XII, put away
in 1713 by his Turkish hosts, to whom his intriguing had become a nuisance; Kongsvinger, a
frontier fort on the Swedish border; El Olé, a form of Spanish dance-mime. The desert tour
took place before the opening ceremony of the Suez Canal.
TO FREDERIK HEGEL
(on the occasion of the centenary celebration of Gyldendal, the publishing company.
30 th December 1870)
Take my handclasp, though far distant;
take the thanks dead words afford!
You’ve known well of my persistent
wish to join the festive board.
Could mere wishes level pathways,