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

96
Once I had dreamed of eagle-pinioned fleetness,
And yet amongst the ducks seemed glad to dabble,
The gutter made me take a detour, scrabble,
Till soon I matched life’s geese-flock for unmeetness.
Have I perhaps some higher sphere or station
For which I’m better suited in some way? —
No, it’s a bubble, is my inspiration.
And poetry’s a stock of image-play,
A clutch of counters, metaphors and clauses
Whose cobbling doesn’t rank amongst my causes.
XX
What in the world parades itself more comically
Than lyric grief of elegiac tone,
And poetry that’s still-born, and the moan:
“Life’s rich in night and woe” — so histrionically?
Trust me, your Muse had proved far more canonically
A daughter if, like Cimon’s, she had shown
Her bosom bared, life-sources of her own,
And fed you author-wise, less economically.
For where’s the profit in well-polished verse,
With criss-cross rhymes and rhymes set in reverse,
If they are wasted on mere lamentation?
Their death should coincide with their gestation!
They are ephemera; the form aesthetic
Just serves to hide the truth: the stuff’s bathetic!
XXI
Sail carefully; the poet’s barque capsizes
At the least breath of life’s keen irony,
If you naively signal “Help, a crisis!”
And stand there by the tiller, weak at knee.
Don’t be afraid if anguish swells and prises
Your bosom open if it’s not let free;
It’s just the barrel’s excess fervency,
It needs an outlet as the pressure rises.
But when the noble liquor is extracted
And all the barrel’s left with of that glow
Is mouldy dreg deposits, dry, compacted,
Then seal it up hermetically, just so, —
Depend on it, that cask will hold its faeces;
It won’t explode, just fall, in staves, to pieces.