Canute. ... Above me bent
A sweet, soft-shouldered woman, with supreme,
Abashing eyes, and such maturity—;
The perfect flower of years—;such June of face....
So ceremonious, and yet so fearless
In passionate grace, that I was struck with shame,
And knew not where I was, nor how to speak,
Confounded to the heart. She made me feel
That I was lawless and uncivilised,—;
Barbarian! In all my brave array
I shrank from her, as she had caught me stripped
For some brute pastime. Is this womanhood?
There’s more to see each time one looks at her,
There’s music in her; she has listened much,
Pored o’er the lustrous missals, learnt how soft
One speaks to God....
Act I, Scene 4
Another and more powerful example of our poet’s genius for giving form to the abstract, and triumphing dramatically over a most stubborn theory, is in her creation of Gunhild, the Scandinavian prophetess. Gunhild is something more than a symbol—;though she is that, and stands for ancestry, the ancient gods, and the wild fight with nature of the barbaric order which Canute is renouncing. But she is, besides, a terrifying old witch: an ugly, clinging creature who will not be cast off. She enters to Canute just at the moment when he is thinking of Emma:
Canute [to Hardegon]. Whom hast thou brought?
A brooding face, with windy sea of hair,
And eyes whose ample vision ebbs no more
Than waters from a fiord. I conceive
A dread of things familiar as she breathes.
Gunhild. O King.
Canute. Ay, Scandinavia.
Gunhild. He sees
How with a country’s might I cross his door;
How in me all his youth was spent, in me
His ancestors are buried; on my brows
Inscribed is his religion; through my frame
Press the great, goading forces of the waves.
Canute. Art thou a woman?
Gunhild. Not to thee. I am
Thy past.
Canute. Her arms are knotted in her bosom
Like ivy stems. What does she here, so fixed
Before my seat?
. . . . .
Gunhild. Hearken!... All eve I stood
And gathered in your fate. You raise your hands
To other gods, you speak another tongue,
You learn strange things on which is Odin’s seal
That men should know them not, you cast the billows
Behind your back, and leap upon the horse.
You love no more the North that fashioned you,
The ancestors whose blood is in your heart—;
These things you have forgotten.
Canute. Yes.