The introduction to the third act not only presents the emotions
belonging to what shall follow, heaving deep heart-groans and expending
itself in pity over the stricken hero; it paints with strange clearness
a scene: the sea stretching to the horizon, under leaden sunshine,
empty of every sail--the sea which lies in fact before us when
the curtain rises, fading off into the sky beyond low battlements
which enclose on the outer-side a neglected castle-garden.
Tristan lies with closed eyes upon a couch, in the shadow of a
tree. Kurwenal, sitting at his head, bends a careworn face to listen
for his breathing. A shepherd's pipe is heard playing a little
wavering tune, melancholy in its simplicity to heartbreak. The
tune grieves itself out. A shepherd looks over the wall and, after
a moment watching, calls to Kurwenal, asking if _he_ does not yet
awake? Kurwenal sadly shakes his head. "Even if he should awake,
it would only be to take his leave forever, unless the Physician,
the only one who can help us, should first arrive...." Has he seen
nothing, he inquires, no ship on the sea? "In that case you should
hear a different tune," the shepherd answers, "as merry a one as
I can play! But tell me the truth, old friend, what has happened
to our master?"--"Let be that question!" Kurwenal heavily turns
from it: "not for any asking can you learn! Keep diligent look-out;
go, and when you see a ship pipe loud and merrily." The shepherd
shades his eyes and looks off over the endless blue waste of the
waters. "Barren and empty the sea!" He sets his pipe to his lips
again and plays over, withdrawing, the hauntingly melancholy tune
of before.
Without premonitory sign of returning consciousness, Tristan's
lips move. His voice comes very faint: "The ancient tune.... what
does it wake me?" He opens his hollow eyes. "Where am I?" Kurwenal
starts up with a shout of joy: "Ha, that voice! His voice! Tristan,
my master! my hero! my Tristan!" Tristan by a great effort brings
his mind to consider these sounds, and with great effort speaks:
"Who... calls me?"--"At last! At last!" Kurwenal's heart overflows.
"Life! Oh, life! Sweet life, given back to my Tristan!" Tristan
knows him now. "Kurwenal... is it you? Where have I been?... Where
am I?" Kurwenal on the spot assumes that ultra-joyous tone of persons
about a sick-bed when their faces are turned toward the patient
whom they are determined to infect with hope. "Where you are? In
peace, in safety, in freedom! At Kareol, master! Do you not recognise
the castle of your fathers.?"--"Of my fathers?" Tristan murmurs
stupidly. "Just look about you!"--"What--" the sick man asks after
a vague glance, "what was the sound I heard?"--"The shepherd's
pipe you heard again, after so many days! On the hillside he keeps
your flocks."--"My flocks?..."--"Master, that is what I said! This
is your house, your court and castle. Your people, loyal to the
beloved lord, saved for you, as well as they could, the patrimony
which my hero once made over to them outright, when he forsook
all to travel to a distant land."--"To what land?"--"Cornwall,
to be sure!" And the anxious grey-bearded nurse, to rouse in the
patient some gleam of joy in being, of pride in past prowess, breaks
enthusiastically forth: "Oh, what good fortune Tristan, brave and
bonny, met with there! What splendour of glory, what honors he
won in the teeth of his enemies!"--"Am I in Cornwall?" Tristan
asks discouragingly. "No, no, I have told you! At Kareol."--"How
did I get here?" Kurwenal almost laughs, and in the pride of the
unhoped-for hour cracks a joke. "How you got here? Not on horseback!
A little ship brought you, but to the ship I carried you on these
shoulders of mine. They are broad, they bore you to the shore.
And now you are safe at home, on your own land, the right land,
the native land, where amid familiar pastures and homely joys,
under the rays of the old sun, from death and wounds you blessedly
shall recover!" The rough fellow presses his cheek to his master's
breast, like a woman. There is silence. Tristan stares vacantly
ahead, vaguely pondering the servant's last words, of which the
echo has lingered teasingly in his ear. "Do you believe so?" he
says at last. "I know a different thing--but the manner of it I
cannot tell you! This where I have awakened is not the place where
I have been,--but where I have been--I cannot tell you! I did not
see the sun, I saw no earthly scene, nor any people, but what I
saw--I cannot tell you! I found myself--where from everlasting I
was, whither to everlasting I go: in the boundless realm of the
night which girds the world. One knowledge alone belongs to us
there,--divine eternal perfection of oblivion! How"--he faintly
wails, with a beginning of restlessness--"how have I lost the sense
of it? Is it you again, unforgotten longing, driving me back to
the light of the day? All that still survives in me, a pitiless
torturing love, impels me forth to gaze upon the light which,
deceivingly bright and golden, shines, Isolde, upon you!" With
the memory of Isolde becoming clear-defined again, as he emerges
more completely from the deathlike stupor which had chained him,
agitation seizes upon him, greater from moment to moment. Isolde
still in the region of the sunshine! Still in the light of the
day, Isolde! Unendurable longing to see her repossesses him. For
that it is he has turned back from the portals of death, come back
from among the shadows, to seek for her, to behold her, to find her,
in whom alone it is granted to Tristan to lose himself and cease
to be! His old hatred of the day is upon him, and one's sympathy
feels, well enough, the distress to his fever of being thus drawn
from the dark of unconsciousness and thrust into this glare of
summer. By a natural confusion of ideas, as his agitation turns
to delirium, this day torturing him, this day upon which he calls
a malediction, becomes his old enemy, the Day which used to keep
him from her,--and shifts from that into the signal-light which
even at night used to warn him off. His delusion complete, he calls
imploringly to Isolde, Sweetest, Loveliest, "When, oh, finally,
when, will you quench the torch, that it may announce to me my
happiness? The light... when will it go out?... When will the house
be wrapped in rest?" He falls back exhausted. Kurwenal, whose joy
of a little while before has dropped at the contemplation of this
torment, takes heart again from his hope in the good news he has
to impart. "The one whom of old I braved, from devotion to you,
how am I brought to longing for her now! Rely upon my word, you
shall see her, here, and this very day, if only she be still among
the living!"
The meaning of his words has not penetrated. Tristan is far away
among old scenes. "The torch has not yet gone out! Not yet is the
house wrapped in darkness!... Isolde lives and keeps watch.... She
called to me out of the night!"--"If then she lives," Kurwenal
eagerly, seizes the cue, "let hope comfort you. Dullard as you must
esteem Kurwenal, this time you shall not chide him. Ever since
the day when Melot, the infamous, dealt you the wound, you lay like
one dead. The evil wound, how to heal it? Then I, thick-witted
fellow, reflected that the one who closed the wound made by Morold
could find easy remedy to the injury from Melot's sword. Not long
was I deciding upon the best physician! I have sent to Cornwall,--a
trusty fellow. It cannot be but that he will bring Isolde over
the sea here to you!"
He has understood, Tristan has understood, and started up ablaze,
so beside himself with joy that after the great incredulous cry:
"Isolde is coming! Isolde is near!" he struggles vainly for breath
and words. Then his overflowing gratitude finds an immediate, a
pertinent thing to do, and Kurwenal has all in a moment the reward
of his long passionately-devoted service. The master in his madness
of joy throws his arms around the servant to whom he owes the hope
which in a moment has made him strong and well again. "My Kurwenal,
you faithful friend, whose loyalty knows no wavering, how shall
Tristan ever thank you? My shield and defence in battle and warfare,
in pleasure and pain equally prompt at command,--whom I have hated,
you have hated, whom I have cherished, you have cherished; when
in all truth I served the good Mark, how were you true to him as
gold! When I must betray the noble King, how willingly did you
deceive him! Not your own, but wholly mine, you suffer with me when
I suffer, but what I suffer--that you cannot suffer!" As before the
excitement of his pain, now the excitement of his joy is gradually
turning to delirium. "This dreadful longing which consumes me,
this languishing fire which devours me, if I could describe it,
if you could comprehend it, not here would you loiter but would
haste to the watch-tower, with every sense astrain longingly would
you reach out and spy toward the point where her sail shall appear,
where, blown by the wind and urged on by the fire of love, Isolde
comes steering to me!... There it comes!..." he points wildly,
"There it comes, with brave speed!... See it wave, see it wave,
the pennant at the mast!... The ship! The ship! It streaks along
the reef! Do you not see it?... Kurwenal, do you not see it?" With
watchful intensity he scans Kurwenal's face. Kurwenal hesitates,
between the wish to humour him by going to the watch-tower, and
the fear of leaving him, when the shepherd's pipe is heard again in
the same plaintive tune, and Kurwenal has no heart to pretend. "No
ship as yet on the sea!" he announces heavily. Tristan's excitement,
as the notes spin out their thin music, whose message he seems to
divine, gradually dies; the happy delusion fades; a deeper sadness
than ever, of reaction, closes down upon him. The minor strains
which now for a moment hold his flickering attention are full of
associations for him, all sorrowful. The sound of them came wafted
to him upon the breath of evening when as a child he was told the
manner of his father's death; it came again, plaintive and more
deeply plaintive, in the morning grey, when he learned his mother's
fate. And in their day, he wanderingly reflects, "when leaving an
unborn son he died; when she in dying gave me birth, the ancient
air, full of yearning and foreboding, no doubt pierced its sorrowful
way to them too,--the ancient air, which has asked me before this,
and asks me again in this hour, to what possible end, what destiny,
I was born into the world?... To what destiny?... The ancient song
tells me over again: To spend myself in longing and to die!...
"No! No!" he in a moment corrects himself, and his misery surges
back upon him in all its violence, "That is not what it says! Longing!
Longing! To spend myself in longing, not in longing to find death!
This longing which cannot die to the distant physician calls out
for the peace of death!" Confused images crowd upon him of the
beginning of this affliction. The voyage to Ireland, the wound
of which he was dying, her healing of his wound--only to open it
again; her offering him the poisoned cup which when he drank, hoping
to be cured of ills forever, a fiery charm was upon him, dooming
him never to die, but exist eternally in torture! We remember how
in the fragrant summer night and the balmy presence of Isolde he
blessed the magic draught which opened the region of all enchantment;
but in this hour, parted from her, it seems, forever, the draught
which keeps him vainly aching for her presence, which will not
let him die apart from her, or find a little rest, which makes
him a spectacle of torture for the Day to feed its eyes upon, the
draught seems to him verily no blessing. They are the bitter dregs
he is drinking now of the cup of wonder. "The dreadful draught,"
he terms it, and reaching, with the enumeration of his sufferings,
the point of cursing it, he has the flashed intuition of a truth;
by a poet's spring reaches a conclusion worthy of a philosopher:
that he, he himself is responsible for the effect upon him of the
drink. "The dreadful draught," he cries, "which devoted me to torment,
I myself, I myself, I brewed it! From my father's anguish and my
mother's woe, from the tears of love of all my life, from laughing
and weeping, joys and hurts, I furnished the poisoned ingredients
of the cup!" He had, more plainly, if we seize the sense of his
raving, fed and fostered an inherited emotional nature which made
him the cup's easy victim. And recognising it, he adds to his curse
upon the dreadful cup, with all the strength of his tortured heart,
his curse upon him who brewed it,--and exhausted with his own delirious
violence drops back in a swoon. Kurwenal, who has vainly striven to
calm his frenzy, now sees him with horror relapsed into deathlike
stillness; he calls him, laments over him and over this fatal love,
the world's loveliest madness, which rewards so ill those who follow
its lure. "Are you then dead?" he weeps, "Do you still live?...
Have you succumbed to the curse?" He listens almost hopelessly
for his breathing, and starts up with a return of joy: "No! He
lives! He rises! How softly his lips stir...."--"The ship!" Tristan
murmurs, "Do you not see it yet?"--"The ship?... Certainly!" the
poor nurse answers, with his determined cheerfulness, "It will
arrive this very day.... It cannot delay much longer!"--"And upon
it"--Tristan describes the vision which is calling back the light
to his eyes--"upon it, Isolde. How she beckons, how graciously
she drinks to our peace! Do you see her?... Do you not see her
yet?... How sweetly, lovely and gentle, she comes wandering over the
plains of the sea. On soft billows of joyous flowers she advances,
luminous, toward the land. She smiles comfort to me and delicious
rest, she brings me utmost relief.... Ah, Isolde, Isolde! How kind,
how fair are you!... What, Kurwenal," he breaks off with that return
to agitation toward which his fever by its law begins from the
moment of returning consciousness to drive his poor brain, till,
reaching a violence his strength cannot support, it plunges him
back exhausted into unconsciousness, "What, Kurwenal, you do not
see her? Away, to the watch-tower, dull-witted churl, that the
sight may not escape you which is so plain to me! Do you not hear
me?... To the tower! Quick, to the tower!... Are you there?... The
ship! The ship! Isolde's ship! You must--must see it! The ship!...
Is it possible," he cries despairingly, "that you do not see it yet?"
He has been starting up from his bed, in his eagerness. Kurwenal
has struggled with him to keep him down. While he hesitates as
before between obedience and fear to leave his patient, the servant
realises that the shepherd's pipe has changed its tune,--has changed
it for a shrill, lively, tripping air. He listens with all his
soul for a second, then with a shout of triumph dashes to the
battlements and sends his eyes sweeping the sea. "Ha! The ship!...
I see it nearing from the north!"--"Did I not know it?" Tristan
exults like a child. "Did I not say so? Did I not say she lived
and knit me still to life? From the world which for me contains
her only, how should Isolde have departed?" His joy is new life
poured into him; his agitation this time produces no exhaustion,
he has strength for the moment to squander. "Hahei! Hahei!" shouts
Kurwenal from his post, "How boldly it steers, how the sails strain
in the wind! How it chases, how it flies!"--"The pennant?... The
pennant?" Tristan holds his breath for the answer. "The bright
pennant of joy floats gaily from the topmast!"--"Cheer! The pennant
of joy!... In the bright light of day, Isolde coming to me! To
me, Isolde!... Do you see her self?"--"The ship has disappeared
behind the reef..." Tristan's joy drops like a shot bird. One seems
to feel his heart stop. "The reef?..." he asks trembling, "Is there
danger in it?... That is where the surf rages, the ships founder....
Who is at the helm?"--"The safest of sea-men."--"Could he betray
me? Might he be a confederate of Melot's?"--"Trust him as you would
myself!"--"But you, wretch, are a traitor too!... Do you see her
again?"--"Not yet!"--"Lost!" wails Tristan--but at Kurwenal's shout
in a moment more that the ship has cleared the rocks and is sailing
up the safe channel into port, springs again to the peaks of joy
and promises Kurwenal the bequest of all his worldly goods. And now
Kurwenal from his outlook communicates that he sees Isolde,--she
is waving,--the keel is in the harbour,--Isolde has sprung ashore.
"Down!" Tristan orders wildly, "Down to the shore! Assist her!
Assist my lady!"--"I will bring her up here in my arms--trust to
them! But you, Tristan," the poor nurse stops on his hurried way
down to enjoin, "stay reliably on the bed!"
Tristan, left alone, falls to tossing and writhing with impatience.
His burning fever is confused to his sense with the heat of the
sun, and this day of joy he calls the sunniest of all days. This
tumult of the blood, this julibant urge to action, this immeasurable
delight, this frenzy of joy, how, how to endure them prostrate
upon the couch? Up, bravely up and away, where hearts are alive
and throbbing! We can see his fever again working itself toward
delirium. It reaches this time complete madness. With the proud
cry: "Tristan, the hero, in jubilant strength has raised himself
up from death!" he in fact lifts himself suddenly quite up. And
then no doubt some reminder, at the violent motion, of his wound,
suggests to his madness its next wild fancy, that a sort of glory
is in a streaming wound, such as he bore while fighting Morold,
that he will meet Isolde in the same manner, gloriously bleeding,
not ignobly constrained by a bandage. And prompted by some obscure
instinct perhaps to relieve a torture of which his flaming brain
will not permit him duly to take account, he tears the wrappings
from his wound, shouting with gladness, and bidding his blood now
flow merrily forth. He jumps from the couch, he goes a few feet in
swaying progress toward the castle-gate: She who shall heal the
wound forever draws near like a hero, draws near bringing health,
let the world fade away before his victorious haste!... The victorious
haste has taken him a staggering step or two, when Isolde's voice
comes borne to him, calling before she appears. "Tristan, Tristan!
Beloved!" He stops short and listens, shocked out of the idea of
what he was trying to do, losing his grasp on the present. "What?...
Do I hear the light?" he falters, taken back by the spell of that
voice to the old time, when never the light called to him, or never
the beloved called to him out of the light, but ever and only out
of the night. The suggestion of the darkness now gathering over
his eyes is that the torch is going out,--her signal to him to
come. "To her!" therefore he cries, "To her!" and is making such
effort to hurry as one makes in a dream, when behold, there she is!
There she comes flying to him through the castle-gate, breathless
with her haste. He has strength enough still, in his transporting
joy, to get as far as her arms; but, with the relief of being caught
in them, all relaxes, he sinks to the earth. Frightened, she calls
him. He turns his eyes upon her with the last of their long yearning,
and softly breathes forth his life upon her name. He could not die
before she came, but now at once it is grown sweet and easy.
Isolde cannot believe this which she seems to see. She falls on
her knees beside him, beseeches, coaxes, reproaches him, and wrings
her hands over his obdurate unresponse. "Just for one hour! Just
for one hour, be awake to me still! Such long days of terror and
yearning Isolde has endured for the sake of one hour to spend with
you! Will Tristan defraud her, defraud Isolde of this single
infinitely-short last earthly joy? The wound,--where? Let me heal
it, that we may have the joyous night together!... Oh, do not die of
the wound! Let the light of life go out for us clasped together!...
Too late! Too late!... Hard-hearted!... Do you punish me so with
ruthless sentence? Do you shut your heart to my complaint?... Only
once... only once more!... Look, he wakes! Beloved!..." Consciousness
mercifully forsakes her. She sinks senseless upon his body.
Kurwenal has been standing apart with eyes bent in dumb and rigid
despair upon his master. A confused tumult of arms is heard. The
shepherd climbs hurriedly over the parapet with the announcement:
"A second ship!" Kurwenal starts from his trance of grief and rushes
to look off. He breaks into curses, recognising Mark and Melot
among the men just landed. His resolution is instantly taken. "Arms
and stones! Help me! To the gate!" With the shepherd's help he is
fastening and barricading the castle-gate, when Isolde's skipper
hurries in with the cry: "Mark is behind me with men-of-arms and
folk. Vain to attempt defence, we are overpowered!" Kurwenal does
not pause in his preparations: "While I live, no one shall look in
here! Take your post and help!" Brangaene's voice is heard, calling
her mistress. Kurwenal's excitement, his rage of determination
to keep the sight of those helpless embraced bodies sacred from
profane eyes, shuts his reason to every sign. Brangaene's cry to
him not to close the gate he takes to signify that she is in league
with the enemy. Melot's voice, just outside: "Back, madman! Bar not
the way!" calls forth a fierce laugh: "Hurrah for the day which
gives me the chance to have at you!" The gate resists but a moment;
Melot is first to break in. Kurwenal with a savage cry cuts him
down. Brangaene is heard calling to him that he labours under a
mistake; Mark calling upon him to desist from this insanity. He sees,
understands but one thing, to keep out these enemies of Tristan's,
defend the master to the last against this intrusion. He orders
one of his party to throw back Brangaene, who is coming by the
way of the wall; he hurls himself at the invaders now crowding
in. In self-defence they draw arms upon the slashing madman. He
extorts his death-wound as it were by force from one of them...
Painfully he drags himself along the earth, until he can touch his
master's hand: "Tristan, dear lord! Chide not that the faithful
one comes along too!" The last note about him as he expires is
a fragment of the theme of determined cheerfulness, his pitiful
sick-nurse encouragements to Tristan.
Brangaene has reached Isolde and is making frightened efforts to
restore her. Mark stands regarding the still forms with profound
emotion. Reproach is in his tone when he now speaks, as earlier,
the gentle complainingness of one in all things blameless, who,
doing all for the best, has met with unmerited suffering. "Dead!
All dead!" he mourns, "My hero! My Tristan! Most tenderly-beloved
friend! To-day again must you betray your friend, to-day when he
comes to give you proof of highest faith. Awake! Awake at the voice
of my sorrow, O faithless, faithfullest friend!"
Brangaene's ministrations have brought back a little life to Isolde.
Brangaene holds her in her arms and labours to reassure her. "Hear
me, sweetest lady, happy news let me report. Would you not trust
Brangaene? For her blind fault she has made amends. When you
disappeared, quickly she sought the King. No sooner had the secret
of the potion been made known to him than in all haste he put to
sea, to overtake you, to renounce you, to lead you himself to the
friend!" Mark completes the revelation: "When I was brought to
understand what before I could not grasp, how happy was I to find
my friend free from blame! To wed you to the peerless hero with
full sails I flew in your wake,--but how does ravaging misfortune
overtake him who came bringing peace! I but made greater the harvest
of death! Madness heaped the measure of disaster!"
Isolde has neither heard what they say, nor does she appear to
recognise them. Half of her clearly has gone with Tristan, the
rest is near taking wing, according to her word: "Where Tristan's
house and home, there will Isolde abide." Her own swan-song takes
us a little way with her into her _Liebes-tod_, her love-death.
Her eyes, fixed in contemplation of his face, have the vision of
it returning to life. She sees him re-arise, powerful and loving,
growing in glory till he assumes transcendent splendour. "Do you
see it, friends,--do you not see it?" she asks, of what shines
so vividly before her that her face is transfigured as if with
reflected light. And music is shed from this luminous ascending
form.... "Am I alone to hear it?" she exclaims, it is so clear
to her,--music wonderful and soft, which says everything, which
gently reconciles one to all. It grows, it swells, it penetrates,
uplifts.... And what is this enfolding her? Floods of soft air!
Billows of perfume! They softly surge and murmur around her....
She is in wonder whether to inhale, or to listen, or drink and
be immersed and yield up the breath sweetly amid perfumes.... Ah,
yes, in the billowing surge, in the great harmony, in the breath
of the spheres, to sink under, to drown, to be lost... that, that
will be the supreme ecstasy!... As the mysterious experiences she
describes absorb her soul, her body sinks softly upon Tristan's.
Mark extends his hands in blessing over the dead.
And so the curtain fans on this wonderful and moving drama, and
the thousands scatter in an exalted mood, impressed once more with
the incomprehensible loveliness of love. The point of fascination
of this work does not lie surely in any celebration of enviable
joys, or sorrows nearly as enviable; it is not that it is spiritual,
which would strengthen its appeal for some, neither that it is
sensuous, which would make it alluring to others; it is that it
breathes love,--love, indefinable but unmistakable, mysterious but
absolute, understood of all, explainable by none, and of greater,
or at least more universal, interest than any other emotion. Those
equally fitted to enjoy all Wagner's operas show, it is observed,
a predilection usually for Tristan and Isolde. If the pre-eminent
beauty of the music accounts for this, the fact suggests none the
less that Wagner could reach his utmost eloquence on the theme. It
is as if the composer had wished for once a fair field to render
all he felt and understood of love, and so had chosen a story in
which it moves free from ordinary trammels and is permitted an
intensity more prolonged, more fervid deeps, languors more abandoned,
than love in the shackles of thought and will.
A thing which must not be forgotten. The love of Tristan and Isolde
is not to be brought under the head of what is vulgarly termed a
guilty love. We have seen how Mark learning the secret of the potion
instantly and completely exonerated them and rejoiced that he could
return to his faith in Tristan. We know little of love-potions, and
had best forget such attempts at rational explanation of them as
we may have read, accepting the old story as it is offered, with
its cup of magic by which all struggle against the power of love
became vain. The lovers must be regarded as essentially innocent.
The language of their hearts is always perfectly noble, their music
is never sultry.
It seems to matter less, in the case of this opera than of Wagner's
other operas, that one should be able to distinguish the motifs. When
Fasolt falls, or the dragon, or Mime, it is distinctly interesting
to know that the conspicuous phrase thrilling the air is the Curse
of the Ring; but we are easily willing to let Glances and Sighs
and the Effect of the Love-draught melt into one general fire of
tenderness.
There is likewise less need in the case of this opera than, I think,
any other of Wagner's, to be familiar beforehand with the argument.
Any one seeing the Rhine-gold unprepared would probably not understand
anything whatever, as far as the story is concerned. The same is
in some degree true of Walkuere and Goetterdaemmerung; even of
Parsifal one need to know the inwardness of the plot. But Tristan
and Isolde can be grasped through the eye by the dullest. A Woman
is seen expressing great anger; there is a scene of coldness and
incrimination between her and a Man. They drink from a golden cup
and are from that moment lovers. They talk lengthily and most
mellifluously of love in a garden at night. They are surprised by
one with an evident right to be incensed. The lover is wounded. In
a different scene he lies dying. His love comes to him. He expires
in her arms and she follows him in death. Any one can understand,
everyone sympathises.
In spite of which the study of the original text is full of great
reward; not only because one will hear the music after all with a
richer intellectual enjoyment, but even if one had no hope of hearing
the music. The text produces upon one to a singular extent--or do
we imagine it?--the effect of music. Its musical counterpart is
contained somehow in the written poetry, and mists rise before
our eyes when the small black type informs us that Isolde cries in
the ears of deaf love: "_Isolde rutt!... Isolde kam!_" no otherwise
than if the violins played upon our hearts.