Ibsen the Poet

Ibsen the Poet JOHN NORTHAM IT MAY SEEM to you surprising that so much of the general discussion of Ibsen's work in the English language is preoccupied, directly or indirectly, with the distinction between poetry and prose. Your language reflects a unity of concept that English has long lost. We distinguish sharply between poet and prose writer, letting concern with form, in my opinion, destroy that much more significant unity enshrined in your word "dikter"- a word which, it seems to me, defines not by form but by creativeness of spirit. Thus we agonise over Ibsen the poet as against Ibsen the prose writer, try to locate the place, the reasons, the effects of a dislocation in his work where he ceased to be the one and became the other. I want, in this talk, to discuss Ibsen in your terms, as dikter, rather than in ours; as a man through the whole of whose work, poems, poetic dramas, prose dramas, runs a single unifying, creative intelligence. I shall not pretend that I have anything new to say to such an audience as this; but at a celebration, and this is an occasion of celebration*, it may not come amiss to recall, with admiration and gratitude, the familiar attributes of the dikter we are gathered to honour. I begin with a few observations. Of the poems I can say little- and * This paper was delivered in Oslo in May 1978 as the last of a series of public lectures arranged by Oslo University to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Ibsen's birth. Quotations are from the Fakkel-Bok edition, Henrik Ibsen: Ungdomsskuespi/l og hisloriske dramaer 1850-64. Dikl (Gyldendal, Oslo). 421 422 JOHN NORTHAM should say nothing; my justification is that they interest me. They are virtually ignored in England except where they connect, in some obvious way, with the later plays - Bergmannen with Borkman, De satt der, de 10 with Bygmester Solness, and so on. Some of the poems are, so far as the English are concerned, essentially and exclusively Norwegian - Terje Vigen speaks to you, it does not speak to us. The occasional poems touch no chords in us. For us, Ibsen the writer of poems means, most prominently, the writer of the lyrical and reflective poems. My only reason for venturing to say anything about these is that I have made quite an intimate acquaintance with a few that I have tried, with inevitable lack of success, to translate into English. On that flimsy foundation, I can reasonably comment, I think, that the English reader is likely to be struck by a feeling of familiarity as he reads the poems. Certainly by a poem such as Hlfyfjellsliv, with its romantic evocation of a noble landscape: Men over dikebli'lgers brann, i glans av gull og ray, der heyner seg et fredlyst land, lik·¢flokk spredt i hav. Above the broken surf of cloud, in gold and amber sheen, a hallowed land, an island-crowd stands up remote, serene. an impressive description that leads, at the end, to a general, moral reflection. Not a poem that Wordsworth could have written, but of that family. One registers, too, the familiar romantic subjects-sunset, swan and water-lily: the customary romantic occasions- flowers for a young girl, a poem in praise of a young lady, on a rendezvous under the trees (En Juglevise). And it would be easy to argue for continuity in Ibsen's work, from the poems to the modem prose plays, by showing that these elements in the poems appear in the prose works too. The natural imagery of mountain and ~ ord, storm and sunshine, permeates the prose plays, both in the settings and in the language too -Fruen Jra havel, Lille Eyolf, John Gabriel Borkmann, N8r vi dllde v8gner. The caged bird of Fugl og JugleJenger provides an image for one of the most intimate exchanges between Hilde and Solness; the water-Wy blooms again, most poignantly, in Lille Eyolf. And so on. And as for romantic occasions- love is one ofibsen's great themes. But to link poems to plays on these grounds is to link them through characteristics that Ibsen shares with...