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Translated by James Clarence Mangan
OLD even in boyhood, faint and ill, | |
| And sleepless on my couch of woe, | |
| I sip this beverage, which I owe | |
| To geysers’ depths and Hecla’s hill. | |
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| In fields where ice lies layer on layer, | 5 |
| And lava hardens o’er the whole, | |
| And the circle of the Arctic Pole | |
| Looks forth on snow-crags ever bare; | |
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| Where fierce volcanic fires burn blue, | |
| Through many a meteor-lighted night, | 10 |
| Mid springs that foam in boiling might, | |
| These blandly bitter lichens grew. | |
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| Where from the mountain’s furnace-lair, | |
| From thousand smoke-enveloped cones, | |
| Colossal blocks of red-hot stones | 15 |
| Are, night by night, uphurled in air | |
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| (Like blood-red saga-birds of yore), | |
| While o’er the immeasurable snows | |
| A sea of burning resin flows, | |
| Bubbling like molten metal ore; | 20 |
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| Where, from the jökuls to the strand, | |
| The dimmed eye turns from smoke and steam | |
| Only to track some sulphur-stream | |
| That seethes along the blasted land; | |
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| Where clouds lie black on cinder-piles, | 25 |
| And all night long the lone seal moans, | |
| As, one by one, the mighty stones | |
| Fall echoing down on far-off isles; | |
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| Where, in a word, hills vomit flame, | |
| And storms forever lash the sea,— | 30 |
| There sprang this bitter moss for me, | |
| Thence this astringent potion came. | |
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| Yes! and my heart beats lightlier now, | |
| My blood begins to dance along: | |
| I now feel strong,—O, more than strong! | 35 |
| I feel transformed, I know not how. | |
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| The meteor-lights are in my brain,— | |
| I see through smoke the desolate shore,— | |
| The raging torrent sweeps once more | |
| From Hecla’s crater o’er the plain. | 40 |
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| Deep in my breast the boiling springs | |
| Beneath apparent ice are stirred,— | |
| My thoughts are each a saga-bird, | |
| With tongues of living flame for wings! | |
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| Ha! if this green beverage be | 45 |
| The chalice of my future life,— | |
| If now, as in yon isle, the strife | |
| Of snow and fire be born in me,— | |
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| O, be it thus! O, let me feel | |
| The lava-flood in every vein! | 50 |
| Be mine the will that conquers pain, | |
| The heart of rock, the nerves of steel! | |
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| O, let the flames that burn unfed | |
| Within me wax until they glow, | |
| Volcano-like, through even the snow | 55 |
| That in few years shall strew my head! | |
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| And, as the stones that Hecla sees | |
| Flung up to heaven through fiery rain | |
| Descend like thunderbolts again | |
| Upon the distant Faröese, | 60 |
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| So let the rude but burning rhymes | |
| Cast from the caldron of my breast | |
| Again fall flashing down, and rest | |
| On human hearts in farthest climes! | |
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