The Triumph of Death

by Gabriele D'Annunzio

Then the most intoxicating poem of human passion was triumphantly unfolded, like a spiral, to the summits of delirium and ecstasy. It was the first frantic embrace, the mingling of voluptuousness and of anguish, in which the souls, eager to melt into one another, encountered the impenetrable obstacle of the body; it was the first rancor against the time when love did not exist, against the empty and useless past. It was the hate against hostile light, against the perfidious day, that sharpened all their sufferings, that revived all the fallacious appearances, that favored pride and oppressed tenderness. It was the hymn to the friendly night, to the beneficent shade, to the divine mystery of which the marvels and inner visions were unveiled, in which were heard the distant voices of the spheres, in which the ideal corollas flourished on inflexible stems. "Since the sun is hidden in our bosom, the stars of happiness shed their laughing light."

And, in the orchestra, spoke every eloquence, sang every joy, wept every misery, that the human voice had ever expressed. The melodies emerged from the symphonic depths, developing, interrupting, superposing, mingling, melting into one another, dissolving, disappearing to again appear. A more and more restless and poignant anxiety passed over all the instruments and expressed a continual and ever-vain effort to attain the inaccessible. In the impetuosity of the chromatic progressions there was the mad pursuit of a happiness that eluded every grasp, although it shone ever so near. In the changings of the tone, rhythm, and measure, in the succession of syncopes, there was a truceless search, there was a limitless covetousness, there was the long torture of desire ever deceived and ever extinguished. A motif, a symbol of eternal desire, eternally exasperated by a deceptive possession, returned every instant with a cruel persistence; it enlarged, it dominated, now illuminating the crests of the harmonic waves, now obscuring them with funereal darkness.

The frightful power of the philter operated on the soul and on the flesh of the two lovers already consecrated to death. Nothing could extinguish or soften that fatal ardor; nothing, except death. They had vainly tried every caress; they had vainly summoned all their strength to unite in a supreme embrace, to finally possess one another, to become one and the same being. Their sighs of voluptuousness were transformed into agonizing sobs. An infrangible obstacle was interposed between them, separated them, rendered them strangers and solitary. The obstacle was their corporeal substance, their living personality. And a secret hate was born in both. A longing to destroy themselves, to annihilate themselves; a desire to cause death and a desire to die. Even in the caress they recognized the impossibility of crossing the material limits of their human senses. Lips met lips and stopped. "Why not succumb to death," said Tristan, "rather than separation, and what prevents Tristan from loving Ysolde forever, living hereafter eternally for her alone?" And already they entered into the infinite darkness. The outside world disappeared. "So," said Tristan, "so should we die, unwilling to live but for love, inseparable, forever united, without end, without awakening, without fear, without name in the bosom of love." The words were distinctly heard in the pianissimo of the orchestra. A new ecstasy ravished the two lovers and carried them to the threshold of the marvellous nocturnal empire. Already they tasted in advance the beatitude of dissolution, felt themselves delivered from the weight of the body, felt their substance sublimated and float, diffused in an endless joy. "Without end, without awakening, without fear, without name...."

"Take care! Take care! Behold the night giving way to the day," warned from above the invisible Brangane. "Take care!" And the shudder of the matinal frost traversed the park, awoke the flowers. The cold light of the dawn ascended slowly and covered up the stars that palpitated more strongly. "Take care!" Vain warning of the faithful watcher. They were not listening; they would not, could not, awaken themselves. Under the menace of the day, they plunged still further on into that darkness from which could never come the slightest glint of twilight. "Let the night eternally envelop us." And a whirlwind of harmonies enveloped them, clasped them close in its vehement spirals, transformed them to the distant shore invoked by their desire, there where no anguish oppressed the flights of the loving soul, beyond all languor, beyond all pain, beyond all solitude, in the infinite serenity of their supreme dream.

"Save thyself, Tristan!" It was the cry of Kurvenal after the cry of Brangane. It was the unexpected and brutal assault that interrupted the ecstatic embrace. And, while the theme of love persisted in the orchestra, the motif of the hunt burst out with a metallic clash. The king and his courtiers appeared. Tristan hid Ysolde, stretched on the bed of flowers, beneath his ample mantle; he hid her from both gaze and light, affirming by this act his domination, signifying his undoubted right. "The sad day—for the last time!" For the last time, in the calm and resolute attitude of a hero, he accepted the battle with the unknown forces, sure henceforth that nothing could modify or suspend the course of his destiny. While the sovereign sorrow of King Mark was exhaled in a slow and deep melopee, he remained silent, immovable in his secret thought. And finally he responded to the king's questions: "Never can I reveal that mystery. Never can you know what thou dost ask." The philter motif condensed in this response the obscurity of the mystery, the gravity of the irreparable event. "Dost thou wish to follow Tristan, O, Ysolde?" he demanded of the queen, simply, in the presence of all. "In the land where I am going the sun does not shine. It is the land of shadows; it is the land of night from which my mother sent me when, conceived by her in death, in death I came to life." And Ysolde: "There where the country of Tristan is, there would Ysolde go. She wants to follow him, gentle and faithful, in the path that he will point out."

And the dying hero preceded her to that land, struck by the traitor Melot.

Meanwhile, the third prelude evoked the vision of the distant shore, the arid and desolate rocks, where, in the secret caves, the sea seemed to weep ceaselessly in inconsolable mourning. A mist of legend and of mysterious poesy enveloped the rigid forms of the rock, perceived as in an uncertain dawn or in an almost extinguished twilight. And the sound of the pastoral pipe awoke the confused images of the past life, of the things lost in the night of time.

"What says the ancient lament?" sighed Tristan. "Where am I?"

On the fragile reed the shepherd modulated the imperishable melody transmitted by our ancestors through the ages; and, in his profound unconsciousness, he was without inquietude.

And Tristan, to whose soul these humble notes had revealed all: "I did not linger in the place of my awakening. But where have I dwelt? I could not say. There I saw neither the sun, nor the land, nor the inhabitants; but what I saw then, I could not say.... It was there where I always was, there where I will go forever; in the vast empire of the universal night. Yonder, a single and unique science is given us: the divine, the eternal, the original oblivion!" The delirium of fever agitated him; the ardor of the philter corroded his inmost fibres. "Oh! what I suffer thou canst not suffer! The terrible desire which devours me, that implacable fire which consumes me! Ah! if I could tell thee! If thou couldst understand me!"