Today’s Poem: The Harp Song of the Dane Women

Ah, what is Woman that you forsake her?

Oscar Wergeland, The Norwegians Land in Iceland in the Year 872, 1877 (Wikimedia Commons)

The Harp Song of the Dane Women

by Rudyard Kipling

What is a woman that you forsake her,
And the hearth-fire and the home-acre,
To go with the old grey Widow-maker?

She has no house to lay a guest in
But one chill bed for all to rest in,
That the pale suns and the stray bergs nest in.

She has no strong white arms to fold you,
But the ten-times-fingering weed to hold you
Out on the rocks where the tide has rolled you.

Yet, when the signs of summer thicken,
And the ice breaks, and the birch-buds quicken,
Yearly you turn from our side, and sicken —

Sicken again for the shouts and the slaughters.
You steal away to the lapping waters,
And look at your ship in her winter-quarters.

You forget our mirth, and talk at the tables,
The kine in the shed and the horse in the stables
To pitch her sides and go over her cables.

Then you drive out where the storm-clouds swallow,
And the sound of your oar-blades, falling hollow,
Is all we have left through the months to follow.

Ah, what is Woman that you forsake her,
And the hearth-fire and the home-acre,
To go with the old grey Widow-maker?
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Joseph Bottum writes:

The polymath Adam Roberts returns for a look at an underappreciated poem by Rudyard Kipling, who was born on this day, December 30, in 1865. A favorite of ours — and you should read his own newsletter, as we do — Roberts has twice previously appeared here in Poems Ancient and Modern, looking at Wordsworth’s “London, 1802” and Kipling’s “The Changelings.” A science-fiction maven who somehow manages the time for deep readings of Latin prosody, analysis of Tolkien, and music criticism, he has his day job as an English professor at Royal Holloway, University of London.

What Roberts points us to, in celebration of Kipling’s birthday, is the curious and too-rarely remarked mixture of short stories and poetry in his books from Traffics and Discoveries (1904) to Debits and Credits (1926). When the poems comment on or continue the stories, it’s a literary feat — particularly when, as Roberts notes, the poetry itself is delicately constructed work.

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Adam Roberts writes:

Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) printed “The Harp Song of the Dane Women” in his 1906 collection of short fiction, Puck of Pook’s Hill. The book consists of various historical stories told to two children, Dan and Una, living at Burwash (in the High Weald of Sussex, where Kipling’s own house was located). The stories are told by people from different eras of English history, plucked from their periods by an elf named Puck, or told by Puck himself (who remembers all of the area’s history, calling himself “the oldest Old Thing in England”).

Each story is accompanied by a poem that relates to its subject or theme. Thus, for example, “The Harp Song of the Dane Women” precedes the prose tale “The Knights of the Joyous Venture,” about a daring Viking raid in Africa.

The poem sees Viking voyages from the point of view of the women left behind, lamenting their menfolk’s foolish urge to adventure. Its eight three-line stanzas rhyme triply, aaa, bbb, etc., with the rhymes all polysyllabic: what used to be called feminine line-endings (where the line ends on an unstressed syllable, as opposed to masculine line-endings where the line ends on a stressed syllable). Polysyllabic rhymes are often used in comic verse where the complexity and fiddliness of the rhyming generating witty humorousness. Think of Byron’s: “But — Oh! ye lords of ladies intellectual / Inform us truly, have they not hen-pecked you all?”

Kipling avoids this comedy with repeated feminine-rhymes that have a mournful sonority, each line-ending a dying-fall — the tripleness of the rhymes building by repetition the tenor of lament.

Metrically the poem works a four-stress line (though lines 3 and 11 have five stresses), balancing dactylic and anapestic feet (that is, metrical feet with one stressed and two unstressed syllables) with trochees and iambs (one stressed and one unstressed). Describing it that way makes it sound messy or undisciplined, but Kipling’s control of the rhythmic pulses is very fine, a varying oarstroke

WHÀT is a / WÒ-man that / YÒU for- / SÀKE her/
And the HÈARTH / FÌRE / and the HÒME / À-cre
To GÒ / with the ÒLD / GRÈY /WÌD-ow MÀK-er

The shift from the first line’s “what is a woman” to the last line’s “ah, what is Woman” is a superbly judged piece of sonic shuffling: from a particular to the general, moving “a” back to repurpose it as a sigh, “ah.” The poem styles the Viking men’s voyaging as a kind of marital infidelity: “What is a woman” meaning “What do I mean to you, why do you care so little for me,” when the other woman, the she repeatedly referred to, is so cold, so unappealing, so deadly.

Sir Philip Burne-Jones’s 1899 portrait of Kipling (Wikimedia Commons)

The blankness, the salt-waste monotony and cold of the world into which the men are travelling is gorgeously evoked, and the sentiment deftly switched about from the male adventuring Viking perspective to the female stay-at-home one (deftly because although the poem is piercingly eloquent about the emotional state of being abandoned, it also manages to contain a sense of precisely the glamor that draws the men away).

Best of all, I think, is the associative logic that leads, like a sort of conceptual rhyming, from stanza to stanza. In Stanza 1, “woman” is linked to home and heat. In Stanza 2 this is inverted into chill houselessness (those “nesting” icebergs, a parody of the nests the woman maintain at home).

Then Kipling really picks up imagistic momentum: The second stanza’s whiteness of the icebergs and the paleness of the polar sun sets (meta-terza-rima like) the tone for the image at the start of Stanza 3: “the strong white arms.” Stanza 3’s hideous, tangling green weed leads to Stanza 4’s green “signs of summer.”

So, the breaking of the ice frees not only the land (in Stanza 4) but the sea (in Stanza 5) with its lapping waters. And the hint of tongue in this last image leads (Stanza 6) to the “talk” at tables. The sixth stanza’s fullness (kine in the shed, horse in the stable) sets up the seventh stanza’s hollow (swallowing) clouds and oar blades splash. And in the final touch, the sound of oars in the water recalls the sound of the woman in song. In each case a principle of contrasting as-it-were rhyming propels the poem. Life and death, and the puzzlement of women at men’s constancy in choosing the latter.

Frank Dicksee, Vikings Heading for Land, 1873 (Wikimedia Commons)

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