Lamentation 5: A golden cup his mistress // Gave him, with parting breath

Midway through Goethe’s Faust: Part One, Margareta returns home unsettled by a first meeting with Faust on a nearby street. Ruminating on her uneasiness as she undresses in her room, she absentmindedly begins singing a lament that tells of a king who has lost his wife. To his dying day the king keeps the memory of his beloved alive through a golden chalice she had given him, a gift he holds dearer than all else he has.

In Thule there reigned a monarch,
And he was true till death.
A golden cup his mistress
Gave him, with parting breath.

That was his dearest chalice,
No other did he prize,
And ever, as he raised it,
The tears stood in his eyes.

Then came his time of dying,
His wealth of state was told;
He left his heir his treasure,
Except his cup of gold.

Surrounded by his vassals
A royal feast held he,
High in the castle’s state-room,
Ancestral, by the sea.

There stood the royal master,
Drank, in life’s sunset glow,
And hurled the sacred goblet
To the ocean, deep below.

He saw it plunge and founder
And sink deep in the sea.
The light sank from his vision,
And never again drank he. (126)

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Another entry in an occasional series of posts of lamentation. (The introduction to this series can be found here, and links to the complete series here.)