Abbildungen der Seite
PDF
EPUB

And therefore, O ye Elements, I know—
Ye know it too - it hath been granted me,
Not to die wholly, not to be all enslaved.
I feel it in this hour. The numbing cloud
Mounts off my soul: I feel it, I breathe free.

Is it but for a moment?

Ah, boil up, ye vapors !

Leap and roar, thou sea of Fire!

My soul glows to meet you.

Ere it flag, ere the mists

Of despondency and gloom
Rush over it again,

Receive me! save me!

[He plunges into the crater.]

The music of the boy Callicles, to which he chants his happy mythic stories, somewhat frigidly perhaps, relieves, as it sounds in the distance, the gloomy catastrophe.

Tristram and Iseult (these names form the title of the next and only other considerable poem) are, in the old romantic cycle of North-France and Germany, the hero and the heroine of a mournful tale. Tristram of Lyonness, the famed companion of King Arthur, received in youth a commission to bring from across the sea the Princess Iseult of Ireland, the destined bride of the King of Cornwall. The mother of the beautiful princess gave her, as a parting gift, a cup of a magic wine, which she and her royal husband should drink together on their marriage-day in their palace at Tyntagil; so they should love each other perfectly and forever. But on the voyage it befell

[ocr errors]

The calm sea shines, loose hang the vessel's sails,
Before us are the sweet green fields of Wales,

And overhead the cloudless sky of May.

Ah, would I were '

(saith Iseult)

'Ah, would I were in those green fields at play,
Not pent on shipboard this delicious day.

Tristram, I pray thee of thy courtesy,

Reach me my golden cup that stands by thee,

And pledge me in it first for courtesy.'

[blocks in formation]

On the dreamy seas it so befell, that Iseult and Tristram drank together of the golden cup. Tristram, therefore, and Iseult should love each other perfectly and for ever. Yet nothing

the less for this must Iseult be wedded to the King of Cornwall; and Tristram, vainly lingering, fly and go forth upon his way.

But it so chanced that, after long and weary years of pas sion vainly contended with, years of travel and hard fighting, Tristram, lying wounded in Brittany, was tended by another, a youthful, innocent Iseult, in whose face he seemed to see the look of that Iseult of the past, that was, and yet could not be, his. Weary, and in his sad despondency, Tristram wedded Iseult of Brittany, whose heart, in his stately deep distress, he had moved to a sweet and tender affection. The modern poem opens with the wedded knight come home again, after other long years, and other wars, in which he had fought at King Arthur's side with the Roman emperor, and subdued the heathen Saxons on the Rhine, lying once more sick and sad at heart, upon what ere long he feels shall be his deathbed. Ere he die, he would see, once yet again, her with whom in his youth he drank of that fatal cup.

Tristram. Is she not come? the messenger was sure.
Prop me upon the pillows once again—

Raise me, my page: this cannot long endure.

Christ! what a night! how the sleet whips the pane!

What lights will those out to the northward be?

The Page. The lanterns of the fishing-boats at sea.

And so through the whole Part I. of our poem, lies the sick and weary knight upon his bed, reviewing sadly, while sadly near him stands his timid and loving younger Iseult, reviewing, half sleeping, half awake, those old times, that hapless voyage, and all that thence ensued; and still in all his thought recurring to the proud Cornish Queen, who, it seems, will let him die unsolaced. He speaks again, now broad awake..

Is my page here? Come turn me to the fire.
Upon the window panes the moon shines bright;
The wind is down; but she 'll not come to-night.

[blocks in formation]

My princess, art thou there? Sweet, 't is too late.
To bed and sleep; my fever is gone by;
To-night my page shall keep me company.
Where do the children sleep? kiss them for me.
Poor child, thou art almost as pale as I;

This comes of nursing long and watching late.
To bed-good night.

And so, (our poet passing without notice from Tristram's semidramatic musings and talkings, to his own not more coherent narrative)

She left the gleam-lit fireplace,

She came to the bed-side;

She took his hands in hers; her tears
Down on her slender fingers rained.
She raised her eyes upon his face-
Not with a look of wounded pride-
A look as if the heart complained;-
Her look was like a sad embrace;
The gaze of one who can divine
A grief, and sympathize.
Sweet flower, thy children's eyes

Are not more innocent than thine.

Sleeping with her little ones, and, it may be, dreaming too, though less happily than they, lies Iseult of Brittany. And

now

What voices are those on the clear night air?

What lights in the courts? what steps on the stair?

PART II.

may see her.

Tristram. Raise the light, my page, that I
Thou art come at last, then, haughty Queen!
Long I've waited, long have fought my fever,
Late thou comest, cruel thou hast been.

Iseult. Blame me not, poor sufferer, that I tarried.

I was bound; I could not break the band,
Chide not with the past, but feel the present;
I am here we meet-I hold thy hand.

Yes, the Queen Iseult of Cornwall, Iseult that was of Ireland, Iseult of the ship upon the dreamy seas long since, has crossed these stormy seas to-night, is here, holds his hand. And so proceeds, through some six or seven pages of Part II., the fine colloquy of the two sad, world-worn, late-reunited lovers. When we open upon Part III.,

A year had flown, and in the chapel old

Lay Tristram and Queen Iseult dead and cold.

Beautiful, simple, old mediæval story! We have followed it, led on as much by its own intrinsic charm as by the form and coloring-beautiful too, but indistinct- which our modern poet has given it. He is obscure at times, and hesitates and falters in it; the knights and dames, we fear, of old NorthFrance and Western Germany would have been grievously put to it to make him out. Only upon a fourth re-reading, and by the grace of a happy moment, did we satisfy our critical conscience that, when the two lovers have sunk together in death, the knight on his pillows, and Queen Iseult kneeling at his side, the poet, after passing to the Cornish court where she was yesternight, returns to address himself to a hunter with his dogs, worked in the tapestry of the chamber here, whom he conceives to be pausing in the pictured chase, and staring, with eyes of wonder, on the real scene of the pale knight on the pillows and the kneeling lady fair. But

Cheer, cheer thy dogs into the brake,

O hunter! and without a fear

Thy golden-tasselled bugle blow,
And through the glade thy pastime take!
For thou wilt rouse no sleepers here,

For these thou seest are unmoved;

Cold, cold as those who lived and loved
A thousand years ago."

Fortunately, indeed, with the commencement of Part III., the most matter-of-fact quarterly conscience may feel itself pretty well set at ease by the unusually explicit statements that

A year had fled; and in the chapel old

Lay Tristram and Queen Iseult dead and cold.

The young surviving Iseult, one bright day
Had wandered forth; her children were at play
In a green circular hollow in the heath

Which borders the sea shore; a country path

Creeps over it from the tilled fields behind.

Yet anon, again and thicker now perhaps than ever, the mist of more than poetic dubiousness closes over and around us. And as he sings to us about the widowed lady Iseult, sitting upon the sea-banks of Brittany, watching her bright-eyed children, talking with them and telling them old Breton stories, while still, in all her talk and her story, her own dreamy memories of the past, and perplexed thought of the present, mournfully mingle, it is really all but impossible to ascertain her, or rather his, real meanings. We listen, indeed, not quite unpleased, to a sort of faint musical mumble, conveying at times a kind of subdued half-sense, or intimating, perhaps, a threequarters-implied question; Is any thing real?—is love any thing?-what is any thing?-is there substance enough even in sorrow to mark the lapse of time?—is not passion a diseased unrest?—did not the fairy Vivian, when the wise Merlin forgot his craft to fall in love with her, wave her wimple over her sleeping adorer?

Nine times she waved the fluttering wimple round,
And made a little plot of magic ground;

And in that daisied circle, as men say,
Is Merlin prisoner to the judgment day,
But she herself whither she will can rove,

For she was passing weary of his love.

Why or wherefore, or with what purport, who will venture exactly to say?— but such, however, was the tale which, while Tristram and his first Iseult lay in their graves, the second Iseult, on the sea-banks of Brittany, told her little ones.

And yet, dim and faint as is the sound of it, we still prefer this dreamy patience, the soft submissive endurance of the Breton lady, and the human passions and sorrows of the Knight and the Queen, to the high, and shall we say, pseudoGreek inflation of the philosopher musing above the crater, and the boy Callicles, singing myths upon the mountain.

« ZurückWeiter »