The Triumph of Death

by Gabriele D'Annunzio

And here another voice, a human voice, modulated by human lips, young and strong, mingled with melancholy, irony, and menace, sang a song of the sea, from the head of a mast, on the ship that carried to King Mark the blond Irish spouse. It sang: "Toward the Occident wanders the gaze; toward the Orient sails the ship. The breeze blows fresh toward the natal land. O daughter of Ireland, where dost thou linger? Is it thy sighs that swell my sail? Blow, blow, O wind! Woe, ah! woe, daughter of Ireland, my wild love!" It was the admonition of the lookout, the prophetic warning, joyous and menacing, full of caress and of raillery, indefinable. And the orchestra became silent. "Blow, blow, O wind! Woe, ah! woe, daughter of Ireland, my wild love!" The voice sang over the tranquil sea, alone in the silence, while under the tent, Ysolde, motionless, on her couch, seemed plunged in the obscure dream of her destiny.

Thus opened the drama. The tragic breath, that had already been given by the prelude, passed and repassed in the orchestra. Suddenly the power of destruction was manifested in the enchantress against the man of her choice, whom she had devoted to death. Her anger was unchained with the energy of the blind elements; she invoked all the terrible forces of earth and heaven to destroy the man whom she could not possess. "Awake at my call, indomitable power; come forth from the heart where thou art hidden! O, uncertain winds, hear my will! Awake the lethargy of this dreamy sea, resuscitate from the depths implacable covetousness, show it the prey which I offer! Crush the vessel, engulf the wreckage! Everything that palpitates and breathes, O winds, I give to thee in recompense." To the admonition of the lookout responded the sentiment of Brangane: "O, woe! what ruin I foresee, Ysolde!" And the gentle and devoted woman tried to appease that mad fury. "Oh! tell me thy sorrow, Ysolde! Tell me thy secret!" And Ysolde replied: "My heart is choking. Open, open wide the curtain!"

Tristan appeared, upright, motionless, his arms crossed, his gaze fixed on the distances of the sea. From the masthead the lookout resumed his song, on the wave mounting from the orchestra, "Woe, ah! woe—" And, while Ysolde's eyes, lit up by a sombre flame, contemplated the hero, the fatal motif arose from the Mystic Gulf: the great and terrible symbol of love and death, in which was enclosed every essence of the tragic fiction. And, with her own mouth, Ysolde predicted the end: "Chosen of mine, lost by me."

Passion aroused in her a homicidal mania, awakened in the roots of her being a hostile instinct to existence, a need of dissolution, of annihilation. She raged to find in herself and all about her a crushing power that would strike and destroy without leaving a trace. Her hate became fiercer at the sight of the calm and motionless hero, who felt the menace concentrate upon his head and who knew the uselessness of any resistance. Her mouth was filled with bitter sarcasm. "What thinkest thou of that slave?" she demanded of Brangane, with an uneasy smile. Of a hero she made a slave; she declared herself the conqueror. "Tell him that I, Ysolde, command my vassal to fear his sovereign." Such was the defiance she cast at him for a supreme struggle; such was the gauntlet that force threw down to force. A sombre solemnity accompanied the hero's march toward the threshold of the tent when the irrevocable hour had sounded, when the philter had already filled the cup, when destiny had already closed its circle around the two lives. Ysolde, leaning on her couch, pale as if the great fever had consumed all the blood in her veins, waited, silently. Tristan appeared on the threshold: both erect to their full height. But the orchestra told of the inexpressible anxiety of their souls.

From this moment recommenced the tempestuous ascension. It seemed that the Mystic Gulf had once more become inflamed like a furnace and shot higher, even higher, its sonorous flames. "Only comfort for an eternal mourning, salutary draught of oblivion, I drink thee without fear!" And Tristan placed the cup to his lips. "Half for me! I drink it for thee!" cried Ysolde, snatching the cup from his hands. The golden cup fell, empty. Had they both drunk death? Must they die? Instant of superhuman agony. The philter of death was but a poison of love that filled them with an immortal fire. At first, astonished, motionless, they looked at each other, sought in one another's eyes the symptom of the death to which they believed they had devoted themselves. But a new life, incomparably more intense than that they had lived, agitated their very fibre, beat at their temples and at their wrists, swelled their hearts with an immense wave. "Tristan!" "Isolde!" They called one another; they were alone; nothing breathed about them; appearances were effaced; the past was wiped out; the future was a dark night that even their recent intoxication could not pierce. They lived; they called one another in hot, passionate tones; each was drawn to the other by a fatality that henceforth no power could arrest. "Tristan!" "Ysolde!"

And the melody of the passion spread out, enlarged, exalted itself, throbbed and sobbed, cried and chanted above the profound tempest of harmonies that became more and more agitated. Mournful and joyous, it took an irresistible flight toward the heights of unknown ecstasies, toward the heights of the supreme voluptuousness. "Delivered from the world, I possess thee at last, O! thou, who alone fill my soul, supreme voluptuousness of love!"

"Hail! Hail to Mark! Hail!" cried the crew amid the blasts of the trumpets, saluting the king, who drew away from the shore to go to meet his blond spouse. "Hail to Cornwall!"

It was the tumult of common life, the clamor of profane joy, the dazzling splendor of the day. The Elect, the Lost, with a look in which floated the sombre shadow of a dream, demanded: "Who comes hither?" "The King." "What king?" Ysolde, pale and convulsed beneath the royal mantle, asked: "Where am I? Do I still live? Must I still live?" Gentle and terrible, the motif of the philter ascended, enveloped them, enclosed them in its ardent spiral. The trumpets sounded. "Hail to Mark! Hail to Cornwall! Glory to the King!"

But, in the second prelude, all the sobs of too strong a joy, all the pantings of exasperated desire, all the starts of furious expectation, alternated, mingled, were confounded. The impatience of the feminine soul communicated its thrills to the immensity of the night, to all the things that, in the pure summer night, breathed and watched. The ravished soul threw its appeals to everything, that they might remain vigilant beneath the stars, that they might be present at the festival of its love, at the nuptial banquet of its joy. Insubmergible over the restless ocean of harmony, the fatal melody floated, growing light, clouding. The wave from the Mystic Gulf, like the respiration of a superhuman bosom, swelled, rose, fell back to rise again, to fall again and slowly die away.

"Dost thou hear? It seems to me that the sound has died away in the distance." Ysolde heard nothing more but the sounds imagined by her desire. The horns of the nocturnal chase resounded in the forest, distinct, coming nearer. "It is the deceptive whispering of the leaves that the wind rustles in its sport. That gentle sound is not that of horns; it is the murmur of the mountain stream that gushes forth and falls in the silent night." She heard nothing but the enchanting sounds born in her soul by the desire left there by the old yet ever new charm. In the orchestra, as in her abused senses, the resonances of the chase were magically transformed, dissolving into the infinite murmurs of the forest, into the mysterious eloquence of the summer night. All those smothered voices, all the subtle seductions, enveloped the panting woman and suggested to her the approaching ravishment, while Brangane warned and begged in vain, in the terror of his presentiment: "Oh! let the protecting torch blaze! Let its light show thee the peril!" Nothing had the power of enlightening the blindness of desire. "Were this the torch of my life, I would extinguish it without fear. And I extinguish it without fear." With a gesture of supreme disdain, intrepid and superb, Ysolde threw the torch to the ground; she offered her life and that of the Elect to the fatal night; she entered with him into the shadow forever.