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lines of the waves. The power of the maelstrom must be in
her kiss, and the yielding softness of the foam in the
embrace of her arms.” In the same passage, Jacobsen praises
the vitality of Shakespeare’s style as a contrast to that of
the Danish romanticists.
His search for unique and characteristic expressions had
free play in Marie Grubbe, where he could draw on the
store of quaint archaic and foreign words he unearthed in
his preliminary studies. To avoid the harsh staccato of the
North, he made full use of the redundant words and
unaccented syllables that were more common in the old Danish
than in the modern, and thereby he gained the effect of prose
rhythm. While discarding outworn phrases, he often coins
new words, as for instance when he is not satisfied to let
the sunlight play on the wings of the doves circling around
Frederiksborg castle, or even to make the sunlight golden,
but must needs fashion the word “sungold” (solguld),
which in two syllables is the concentrated essence of what
he wishes to say. Sometimes he gives a sharper edge to a
common expression merely by changing the usual order of
two coupled words, as when he speaks of Ulrik Christian
as slim and tall, instead of tall and slim—a minute touch
that really adds vividness to the picture.
The habit of looking for characteristic features, which
he had acquired in his botanical studies, became an apt tool
of his creative faculty. Sometimes his descriptions seem
overloaded with details, as when he uses two pages to tell
about the play of the firelight in the little parlor at
Aggershus, where Marie Grubbe sits singing to the tones of her
lute. Yet the images never blur nor overlap one another.
Every word deepens the central idea: the sport of the storm
with the fire and the consequent struggle between light and
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