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

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In wondrous dreaming visions
I too began to play,
The sprite’s mysterious singing
Stays with me to this day!”
Such was his tale; — his voice fades at the last,
And still he stands there, ashen of complexion,
He whispers at the mournful recollection
Come back to haunt him from the distant past,
While fiddler Thore, boyhood friend, aghast
Slips off, the teacher too, with circumspection;
The rest sit silently, each one reflecting
On that old tale of song that’s so affecting.
Down shone the moonbeams, through the forest wended
And bathed the farm-yard in their pallid light,
A muted sigh that whispered through a night
Now half-obscured upon the scene descended;
Each brisk young escort picks a girl who might
Not care to walk alone and unattended;
One pair heads west, and eastward heads another, —
One does the best one can to help a brother.
The tailor, too, departs now from the throng,
His eerie singing silenced now forever,
As usual, year by year he jogs along,
Grows old with time, like all things whatsoever, —
But many a lad from childhood will endeavour
To hum a kind of echo of his song.
And still his fame as singer lives, ne’er haler,
That aged man, Hardanger’s travelling tailor!
Ibsen chose an abbreviated version of the tailor’s song to open his 1871 volume of poems,
under the title Fiddlers.
THE EIDER DUCK
The eider-duck dwells in the northern land,
Is reared off the fjord’s black, gloomy strand,
It plucks the fine, delicate down from its breast
And fashions a warm and a cosy nest.
There it will hatch out the young it’s to rear,
The shore full of smiles in its summer gear.
But the local fisherman, mischief bound,
Steals up to the reef without a sound.