Poems (Elgee, 1907)/Undine
FROM THE DANISH.
NDINÉ by the lonely shore,In lonely grief, is pacing;
The vows her perjured lover swore
No more with hope retracing.
Yet none in beauty could compare
With ocean's bright-haired daughter,
Her cheek is like the lotus fair
That lieth on the water;
Her eye is like the azure sky,
The azure deep reflecteth;
Her smile, the glittering lights on high,
The glittering wave collecteth.
Her robe of green with many a gem
And pearl of ocean shineth,
And round her brow a diadem
Of rosy coral twineth.
Like diamonds scattered here and there,
The crystal drops are glistening
Amid her flowing golden hair,
As thus she paceth listening—
Listening through the silver light,
The light that lover loveth;
Listening through the dark midnight,
But still no lover cometh.
An earthly love her heart enthralls,
She loves with earth's emotion;
For him she left her crystal halls
Beneath the crystal ocean.
Abjured them since he placed that day
The gold ring on her finger,
Though still the sparkling diamond spray
Around her robe would linger.
And she hath gained a human soul,
The soul of trusting woman;
But love hath only taught her dole,
Through tears she knows the human.
So from her sisters far apart,
Her lonely path she taketh,
With human sorrow in the heart
That human love forsaketh.
She weaves a crown of dripping reeds,
On which the moon shines ghastly—
"A wedding crown my lover needs,
My pale hands weave it fastly."
She treads a strange and solemn dance,
The waves around her groaning,
And mingles, with prophetic sense,
Her singing with their moaning.
"My bridegroom, nought can save thee now,
Since plighted troth is broken—
The fatal crown awaits thy brow,
The fatal spell is spoken.
Thou'rt standing by another bride,
Before the holy altar—
A shadowy form at thy side
Will make thy strong heart falter.
"To her, within the holy church,
Thy perjured vows art giving;
But never shalt thou cross the porch
Again amidst the living.
I wait thee 'neath the chill cold waves,
While marriage-bells are tolling;
Our bridal chant, 'neath ocean's caves,
Be ocean's billows rolling."
The bridegroom, in his pride of youth,
Beside the fair bride standeth—
"Now take her hand to plight thy troth,"
The solemn Priest commandeth.
But lo a shadowy form is seen
Betwixt the bridal greeting,
A shadowy hand is placed between,
To hinder theirs from meeting.
The priest is mute, the bridegroom pale—
He knows the sea-nymph's warning;
The fair bride trembles 'neth her veil,
The bridal's turned to mourning.
No more within the holy church,
Love's holy vows are giving;
They bear the bridegroom from the porch—
The dead amidst the living!
Note to Undiné.
These Undinés, or Ocean Nymphs, according to the Northern Mythology, are gentle, beautiful, harmless creations in the form of woman, but without a soul. They can attain this only by union with a mortal, and as they have a passionate desire to ascend into the higher life of humanity, they seek such earthly unions, not guilefully, like the Sirens, but lovingly, aspiringly, as the human might aspire to the angel. It is a beautiful mythus, and veils a deep and profound meaning. De La Motte Fouqué has made it familiar to all readers by his exquisite romance of "Undiné," and Bulwer has revealed some of the hidden truths shadowed forth by the fable, in his two novels of "Ernest Maltravers" and "Alice"—namely, the power of love to create an intellect, in fact, a soul in woman. For, to the deep-thinking, close-observing psychologist, there is no truth more evident than that, under the influence of love, a woman's intellect, genuis, energy, all the powers of her mind seem capable of infinite expansion. And just in proportion as love has need of them, do the particular qualities start into life and unimagined vigour; be it fortitude, heroism, mental energy, even physical courage, love seems to have the power to create them all. Nothing is impossible to a woman that loves, as nothing is impossible to a man who wills. Another truth is symbolised in this ocean hieroglyphic—namely, that it is the instinct of a woman's nature to aspire, while the instinct of a man's nature is to deteriorate—to gravitate towards the animal, to a lower sphere of existence. Woman always loves heavenward; she has the instinct of ascension like flame and ether. Man always loves earthward; he gravitates to earth, not to spirit: no that we may formulize thus:—Love gives soul to a woman, but takes it from a man. This is assuming what, indeed, is true, that man always bestows his love, by preference, on fair Undines without souls. When united to such he necessarily divides his soul with her, for all things in nature tend to an equalization, and as he gives half so he loses half. What the result would be if a man of genius wedded a priestess of the eternal fire we have no means of ascertaining; for history contains no solitary instance of a man of genius becoming united to his equal: that true correlative of his soul, of which Plato speaks, but which no one, so destiny seems to decree, shall ever find on earth.
We may imagine, indeed, the possibility of a beautiful, lofty, soaring spirit, standing ever beside man in the combat of life. A serene influence, almost as invisible, yet as sustaining as the ether of heaven, filling him with all divine impulses, strengthening all his noble aspirations, exciting his spirit upwards by all rich and radiant foreshadowings of glory, as Minerva stood, bright in deity, yet loving as humanity, beside her favourite warrior on the plains of Troy. But this is but a fabulous hypothesis; for, as we have said, man always loves earthward, and when united to the soulless. Undine, quickly vanishes with her into the ocean of inanity. Here is another cryptic meaning in the myth—the union is represented as indissoluble. He leaves the human, and descends to her sphere—to a lower state of existence. A man without the influence of love may rise to any height; love is not the absolute requirement for his elevation, as it is for woman's; but, bound to an inferior nature, he must fall, and does fall invariably, irrecoverably, precisely down to her level. There is no hope for him. He cannot resist the fatal miasma of commonplace. He falls for ever into the dull abyss of mediocrity. We are not proof against any of the daily influences, however trivial, that surround us. Always there is a tendency to assimilation, either by ascension or deterioration, and Tennyson's proposition is as true in the converse, as in the original statement:—
What is fine within him growing coarse to sympathise with clay.
And now, as every fable must have a moral, what shall we learn from this mythus of the fatal termination of men who "herd with narrow foreheads?" The moral is obvious. Let all genius remain unwed—
Because so consecrated.