"Revolution" in The Iceman Cometh

"Revolution" in The Iceman Cometh WINIFRED L. FRAZER A POETIC UNE- "The days grow hot, 0 Babylon! 'Tis cool beneath thy willow trees!"- is repeated with variations some dozen times in The Iceman Cometh by the anarchist character Hugo Kalmar. Biographers and critics of O'Neill have failed to note the origin of this important thematic line which reinforces the connotation of the title, wherein the warm, loving bridegroom of the Bible is replaced by the cold, profane iceman of death. The absence of comment might make one wonder if the playwright made up the line and its variations himself, were it not for the fact that they appear in quotation marks and are designated as "Hugo's favorite quotation." Much has been written about the sources of O'Neill's thought, language, and imagery in Iceman. Besides the Bible and Greek myth, frequently considered as influential are Ibsen, Gorky, Strindberg, and Nietzsche, not to mention Schopenhauer, Dante, lung, and Freud.' It has also often been remarked that O'Neill used Heine to good effect. Old disillusioned anarchist Larry Slade (slayed) "sardonically" quotes from "Morphine" what might be called his favorite lines: "Lo, sleep is good; belter is death; in sooth,jThe best of all were never to be born."2 In regard to Hugo's crucial quotation, however, the critics are silent, although the repeated line is one key to the whole truth-illusion theme of the drama and is the line with which the play concludes. It refers to both the love-hate and the anarchist-betrayal plots, and illustrates in its variations O'Neill's disillusionment with both love and revolution,) 2 WINIFRED L. FRAZER On one level, the line with its images of "willow," sensual "Babylon ," "hot" days and the "cool" beneath the trees, which apply to the love-death motif, would appear attributable to some Romantic poet or Swinburne or the "Song of Solomon" or the RuMiyilt, of which O'Neill was fond. But since the quote belongs to Hugo Kalmar (Karl Marx), a political character, it must refer to the anarchist-betrayal plot and the day of doom for Babylon. The German poet Ferdinand Freiligrath (1810-1876), who wrote the poem "Revolution" (Die Revolution ), of which Hugo's is the last of forty lines, stood in both camps, the romantic and the revolutionary. He thus perfectly served O'Neill's need. Freiligrath, one of the best loved of nineteenth century German poets, became a success with his first collection of romantic poems (1838), which were filled with melancholic Weltschmerz and passionate yearning for past times and distant places. He translated Hugo, Byron, Bums, and later, Longfellow, and Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis into German. He introduced Walt Whitman to the German-speaking world by an essay on, and translations of, the American poet. Because of his popularity, in 1842, King Frederick William IV of Prussia granted him a government pension. By 1844, however, Freiligrath turned away from his Exotenpoesie and openly avowed his sympathies with the liberal forces in Ein Glaubensbekenntis (A Credo). After relinquishing his pension, he was forced to flee to Brussels, then Switzerland, and finally, after the publication of a collection of revolutionary poems, ~a Ira, in 1846, to London. At the outbreak of the revolution of 1848, he courageously returned to Germany, where he became her foremost poet. In spite of harassment and arrests, he endorsed the doctrines of the Communist Manifesto, joined Karl Marx in editing the radical paper Neue Rheinische Zeitung in Cologne, and wrote two volumes of political poetry entitled Neuere politische und soziale Gedichte, in the second of which (1851) "Revolution" appeared as the first poem.' After four turbulent years, he again found refuge in the relative peace of London. In 1867 he was still so loved by his countrymen that a large collection was taken up to enable the impecunious poet to return to Germany, where he remained writing romantic and patriotic poetry until his death. He was known to many Americans, including Longfellow and Whittier, who admired his antislavery stand. As late as the 1920's, his work was still so renowned in Germany that Hugo Preuss, father of the Weimar Constitution, hoping to...