Planet Literature

Ilona Lay’s Poem Tristan’s Dream

Ilona Lay’s poem Tristan’s Dream alludes to mankind’s age-old dream of a realm of love that is stronger than death and at the same time forms a counterweight to the world ruled by hatred.

Tristan’s Dream

The evening led me along a secret path,
past leafless trees and the withered fields,
past empty woods and the fading song
of the blackbird, the fruit
of early dreaming and late renunciation,
on and on across the twilight’s ridge.

My foot, frozen, did not feel the ground.
But my heart, throbbing with flames
that never before had entwined it,
guided my steps to a distant light
that, emerging from the midst of the night,
raised its pale face from the hills.

In its very heart I saw you blossom,
you, gliding on the wings of the moon
in peaceful flight over the smooth
carpet of rivers and fields and meadows.
My heart, a leaf, riding in the evening wind,
floated into your arms,
forever escaping the beat of the clocks.

The night, a robe of sparkling velvet,
nestled around us.
But when, as if in motionless dance,
we sank into each other’s arms,
it was as if roots gently stretched out
from one to the other, so that we,
growing together to One plant,
slipped away from the cave of the earth
and meandered towards the universe.

And when we touched the sky,
a bright flower flame sprang from us,
which, dedicated to the god of twilight,
protected the fragile dream birds of the night
forever from the hatchet of the day
and loosed the evening’s clammy hand
from the shivering shell of the soul,
comforting it with its gleam and opening it up
to the whisper of the cosmos.

The Dream of Perpetuating Love

Eternal love or, more precisely: the perpetuation of love – this is an age-old dream of humanity.

The dream is based on the feeling that God, even if he does not grant endless duration to individual life, could at least bestow eternity on that which arises from the intertwining of two existences.

After all, love is more than the mere physical union of two people. Isn’t it in essence something immaterial that should therefore be exempt from the process of decay that applies to matter?

Perpetuation of Love in Myth: Philemon and Baucis

The dream of the perpetuation of love is taken up in countless myths and fairy tales. Among these, the story of Philemon and Baucis told by Ovid in his Metamorphoses is particularly touching.

The tale is about an old couple who, because of their hospitality, are granted the wish by the gods to die at the same time, i.e. not to have to experience the death of the other. After passing away, they transform into a lime tree and an oak tree and, branching out with each other in the roots and twigs, can preserve their love beyond the grave.

Eternal Love in the Starry Sky: A Chinese Saga

The images that people at all times have seen in the stars also often tell of the hope for a special protection of love by the gods. In Chinese astrology, for example, the stars Vega and Altair symbolise a shepherd boy and a weaver’s daughter who are placed on different banks of an uncrossable river by their parents to prevent their relationship.

In the sky, this corresponds to the „silver river“ of the Milky Way that separates Altair and Vega. Once a year, however, the two stars approach each other so that the lovers can come together by crossing the Milky Way, turning it into a bridge of stars. This corresponds to the bridge formed by magpies that allows the lovers in the saga to meet once a year. In China as well as in Japan and Korea, a special festival is dedicated to this event.

Healing Death through Love: Isis and Osiris

Other myths even evoke the dream of healing the wound of death through the power of love. The best known of these is probably the ancient Egyptian myth of Isis and Osiris.

The story tells how the limbs of Osiris, the husband of Isis, are scattered across the land after he has been killed by his brother. Thereupon Isis gathers up the limbs and reassembles them. In this way she can at least be with her beloved one more time and beget a child with him. After that, Osiris becomes the lord of the underworld, Isis the goddess of birth and magic. When the cult was adopted by the Greco-Roman culture, Isis likewise became the goddess of the underworld.

Death as a Refuge for Lovers

Sometimes, however, lovers deliberately seek death in order to save their love in a paradoxical escape from life. Prevented by social conventions from fulfilling their love, they renounce life so as to be at least united in death.

In Japan, there is even a special word for this form of joint suicide of two lovers (Shinjū). It describes the irrevocable rootedness of a person in the heart of another person and at the same time the willingness to protect this close connection through joint death if necessary.

The Tragic Death of Lovers: Tristan and Isolde, Romeo and Juliet

In other cases, the death of lovers is not the result of a conscious decision, but the result of unfortunate circumstances that stand in the way of the fulfilment of love. In this case, however, the seemingly accidental incidents that cause the death of the lovers are often only reflections of the insurmountable social barriers that prevent their love from being fulfilled.

This applies to the love story of Tristan and Isolde as well as to that of Romeo and Juliet. In both cases, death appears as the logical consequence of social norms that clip the wings of love. Thus, the death of the lovers is indeed tragic here, i.e. the inevitable consequence of an unsolvable conflict. On the other hand, on the symbolic level, it also stands for the absolute freedom of love, which, if necessary, saves itself by escaping to the other side of life if it is denied fulfilment in this world.

The Counterworld of Love

All stories of the perpetuation of love ultimately refer to the utopia of a realm of love in which the realm of death is overcome through unconditional devotion to another human being. On the one hand, this can refer quite concretely to the utopia of a world of perfect harmony, a world in which the wound of divisiveness, smouldering since the expulsion from paradise, is healed.

On the other hand, the idea of a realm of love also refers – in a figurative sense – to the vision of a counterworld in which precisely those mechanisms are suspended that cause lovers to fail in the real world: greed and hatred, jealousy and lust for power, all rooted in the claim of individuals or of society as a whole to undermine the self-determination of human beings and to subjugate them to external ends instead.

Image: Rogelio de Egusquiza (1845 – 1915): Tristán e Isolda (La vida; 1912); Museo de Arte Moderno y Contemporáneo de Santander y Cantabria (Wikimedia Commons)