Though this poem is subtitled \u201cfrom the Norwegian of Henrik Ibsen, 1828 \u2013 1906<\/i>\u201d it seems to me that its dialogue with Yeats is at least as interesting. The line \u201cI stare astonished at the harbour lights\u201d echoes the ending of Yeats\u2019 \u201cHer Triumph\u201d loudly and clearly:<\/p>\n
And now we stare astonished at the sea,
\nAnd a miraculous strange bird shrieks at us.<\/p>\n
In its rhythm and slightly mannered phrasing the line \u201cwe might have saved ourselves great misery\u201d sounds <\/i>exactly like Yeats, and that lends the word \u201cmisery\u201d resonances from its context in \u201cNo Second Troy\u201d (\u201cWhy should I blame her that she filled my days \/ With misery\u201d).<\/p>\n
\u201cMy wild spirit unbroken\u201d echoes with a whole range of Yeats\u2019 poems expressing something fundamental to his own arguments with himself. You catch one of the echoes in \u201cThe Tower\u201d:<\/p>\n
I leave both faith and pride
\nTo young upstanding men
\nClimbing the mountain side,
\nThat under bursting dawn
\nThey may drop a fly;
\nBeing of that metal made
\nTill it was broken by
\nThis sedentary trade;<\/p>\n
And of course you catch them repeatedly in poems about Maude Gonne or Iseult Gonne, or the lovely \u201cOn a Political Prisoner\u201d. The argument is enduring and unresolved in both Yeats and Mahon, which is why it makes such fine poetry in both. Because there are so many Yeatsian echoes involved \u2013 not to mention echoes of Mahon himself, of course \u2013 exploring how they intertwine would be a complex and lengthy process. I may come back to it in another entry, but actually I think it\u2019s something best approached in discussion between several people reacting to a group of poems. Such discussions are volatile and alive and in their nature they\u2019re attuned to both the power and the elusiveness of the reverberations involved.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s because the argument is unsettled that \u201cThe Lady from the Sea\u201d is such a profoundly unsettling and at the same time such a profoundly satisfying poem, made the more so by the delicacy of its rhythms and the quietness with which the Lady expresses her continued yearning for another life and her resignation to a sense of perpetual incompletion. I can\u2019t resist quoting the fifth stanza for its rich musicality and the ninth for its divided and equivocal resolution:<\/p>\n
She<\/i>\u00a0 Sometimes, emerging from my daily swim,
\nor gazing from the dock these quiet nights,
\nI know my siren soul; and in a dream
\nI stare astonished at the harbour lights,
\nhugging my knees and sitting up alone
\nAs ships glide darkly past with a low moan.<\/p>\n
*<\/p>\n
She\u00a0 <\/i>I am a troubled woman on the land,
\nI am a seal upon the open sea,
\nbut it\u2019s too late to give my heart and hand
\nto someone who remains a mystery.
\nSiren or not, this is my proper place;
\ngo to your ship and leave me here in peace.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Though this poem is subtitled \u201cfrom the Norwegian of Henrik Ibsen, 1828 \u2013 1906\u201d it seems to me that its dialogue with Yeats is at least as interesting. The line \u201cI stare astonished at the harbour lights\u201d echoes the ending of Yeats\u2019 \u201cHer Triumph\u201d loudly and clearly: And now we stare astonished at the sea, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,58],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1503","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-derek-mahon","category-w-b-yeats"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1503"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1503"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1503\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1506,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1503\/revisions\/1506"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1503"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1503"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1503"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}