cultural resources in henrik ibsen's early environment - Ibsen.net

You sang so often about "the towering mountain," where the spruce forest grows and the
glacier has a home, but visions and dreams that storm majestically in your brothers'
hearts,--those you could forget! Why do you not listen to the rushing, which trembles
richly from the soul before it grows calm? Why do you not weave the visions into a
poem, why do you not form the sounds into chords?
Beautiful shapes beckon here-and-now, you know,--from the valley, from the mountain,
from winter and summer. Do you not see the treasure so brilliantly sparkling,--a poetry of
folk life with delightful flowers! Those fleeting images demand a life in descriptive
poems, symbols of experience, they lack only the skald's inspiring: "Come into being!" to
be dressed magnificently in the poem's draperies!
MEMORIES OF A BALL
A fragment of life in poetry and prose
Prologue:
To Stella!
At your foot I lay down
A bouquet of fresh flowers,
Grown last summer
From memory's herb-bed;
You do not find
There "love's memory,"
Centifoler
And violets,
Or the rich luxuriance
That comes with springtime's sun.
--Stella! The blossoms I give
Are only melancholy bunches
Of faded autumnal asters
Sprouted fragrantly from a grave!
1.
As a comforter through life
The angel of memory is given to us;
491