Der var engang en fest

An essay ("There was once a celebration") about this famous Danish film.  You can read the original here.

Is The Celebration based on a true story?  What follows is the unusual tale of one of Danish cinema’s greatest successes.

“I’ve written two speeches, father.  One is green, and one is yellow.  And you can choose which one it will be.”

“I pick green,” the father answers.

“Green is an interesting choice.  It’s a sort of truth speech.  And I have chosen to call it ‘When father took a bath.’”

So begins the drama in Thomas Vinterberg’s The Celebration.

Christian (Ulrich Thomsen) taps his glasses, stands up, and gives a speech on the occasion of his father’s sixtieth birthday.  After so many years of concealment and lies, the truth about his father’s sex abuse will now be disclosed; Christian’s twin sister just committed suicide, and the guests will now know why.  A celebration dripping with scandal which pulls the rug out from under the festivities – such is the brilliant concept behind The Celebration.  The comfort of home comes face-to-face with discomfort, and the invitees become tongue-tied spectators to a showdown in which the prodigal son, like a latter-day Hamlet, challenges his almighty father.

A celebration, a speech, incest – from where then was this idea taken?   Why did it assume this particular form?  What is the truth about the story behind the film?

For many years there were rumors that The Celebration was based on a real event, even if Vinterberg was always tight-lipped about it when asked.  Now, five years after The Celebration’s world premiere and prize at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival, the unusual story can be told, a story which offers some insight into the creative process and the fragile relationship between fantasy and reality.  At the same time it raises questions about art and a journalist’s responsibility with regard to the truth.

Jekyll and Hide

We recur to March 28, 1996.  Radio host Kjeld Koplev had settled himself down in the Danish Broadcasting Corporation’s studio.  Koplev’s Switchboard, a weekly talk show on channel 1, was about to go on the air.  A thirty-four-year-old man was sitting across from Koplev.  He was the anonymous guest of the day, and he was noticeably nervous.

Koplev’s first question: “Allan, on your father’s sixtieth birthday, you got up and gave a speech.  What did you say in your speech?”

Allan: “I told him a little about my childhood, what he had done to me during my childhood, and what he had taken from me.  Because now everyone else had given speeches for him, so I wanted to give one, too.  You see, he hadn’t always been a perfect angel.”

Koplev uses a particular dramatic model, the “testimonial,” as the guiding force in his conversations.  “A successful episode of the Switchboard,” the radio journalist said recently, “begins with an opening that gets listeners to hang around; this establishes, so to speak, the theatrical space.  Over the course of the next two hours the pieces are laid in place, and dramatic progress is initiated.” 

That day Koplev struck upon a particularly alluring opening: birthday speeches.  In the two hours that ensued, he got Allan to narrate the speech’s horrific back story: at two, in the early 1960s, Allan and his twin sister Pernille moved with their mother from Copenhagen to a small, provincial town in Southern Jutland.  Their mother’s new husband worked as a chef in a hotel which the couple would subsequently take over and manage with great success.  Allan’s stepfather was very well-respected, indeed.  He moved in the town’s finest circles and spoiled the twins with material goods.  The eyes of their schoolmates lingered especially on the twins’ expensive clothes.

Yet the idyllic surface cloaked neglect, abuse, and unbelievable psychopathic behavior.  Just like Jekyll and Hyde, his stepfather would transform himself from a charming hotel owner who would see to the comfort of his guests, to a ruthless sex criminal who would abuse the twins on the sofa in the hotel office.  During these attacks, Allan would see his stepfather as “the silent dark man from the forest”; he had “empty, stinging eyes,” and during the very act would say, “hush, hush, hush – what you would normally say when you turn down a radio.”  The stepfather would only regain his normal facial expression after the matter had been concluded; it was then that he would slip back effortlessly into the role of smiling hotelier.

On numerous occasions his mother would literally catch her husband with his pants down, but do nothing.  The attacks began when Allan and Pernille were about five years old and would go on for years.  As adults Alan and Pernille would both move back to Copenhagen and study to become nurses, but Pernille retreated more and more into herself.  She would become psychotic and end up taking her own life.  But when the family attempted to play down her suicide, something took a hold of Allan.  On his father’s sixtieth birthday in front of seventy-eight guests, he would get his revenge.

Unsound alarm

A touching and fascinating radio program – and one you wouldn’t soon forget.  Thomas Vinterberg heard about the program and was taken with Allan’s courage and righteous wrath.  Vinterberg turned to his friend and manuscript guru Mogens Rukov while the latter was the midst of a peaceful midday meal in his kitchen.  “I’m tired of stories of homosexuals, incest, and pedophilia,” was Rukov’s blunt response.  But then he added: “I can remember family reunions from my own childhood.  I can remember the family.  Let’s do a story on a family business.  Then we can work incest into the family and the business.”

They agreed that the film should adhere to a normal course of events at a Danish family celebration: from the guests arriving, to lunch, to the guests’ departure the next morning.  This was a natural story, and the scandal which threw a spanner in the works was Christian’s speech and the series of speeches in its wake.  Rukov drew inspiration from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, yet Vinterberg’s most importance reference was Coppola’s Godfather.  Allan’s account, however, supplied the film’s basic elements: the hotel, the speech, the twin sister’s suicide, the patriarch (Henning Moritzen), the wild, unruly sister (Paprika Steen), the afterthought (Thomas Bo Larsen), as well as many telling details such as the black sofa in the office.

Yet there was one significant difference between the actual event and the film: Allan’s speech closed and demolished the party; Christian’s speech, however, was merely the opening volley in a harrowing and grotesque drama.  Where Allan’s speech ended was where Vinterberg’s film truly began. 

One part of the dramatization made the film studio’s attorneys sound the alarm.  The connection between The Celebration and Allan’s story was so obvious that Allan’s stepfather could press charges and, in a worst case scenario, even halt the filming itself.  The stepfather’s alleged crimes had never been brought before a judge, and out of fear of a lawsuit the film studio opted to cast the film as pure fiction.

“The events, people, and companies depicted in this film are fictitious.  Any similarity to people, alive or dead, or factual events, is purely coincidental,” began the film’s end credits, with not a word about Koplev’s Switchboard.

And whenever curious journalists persisted, Vinterberg’s answer remained: “My lawyers have placed limits on what I can say.”

Chilly feet 

Even I’m involved.  In 1999 I gave a talk on The Celebration and played part of a recording of Kjeld Koplev’s interview with Allan.  A media sources teacher stood up.  He found it amazing that there were seventy-eight guests, as well as all the cooking and service staff, and even a musician; that all of them experienced the worst party of their lives; that this party became the most talked-about Danish film of all time; and that not one of them had ever made a public pronouncement on the incident.  The teacher then put forth the theory that Vinterberg had trained and planted “Allan” in Koplev’s Switchboard as a type of media stunt, or simply one facet of the film’s robust mise-en-scène.

The theory sounded farfetched; nevertheless, after the talk I sat down and listened carefully to the radio program once more through.  I stopped the recording and noted the chronology of events in Allan’s life, and slowly his story began to crumble.  The number of deaths in Allan’s family were suspiciously high: in less than one year, his girlfriend, twin sister, and mother had all died.  He also confused the ages of his stepsiblings, had to make something up to explain an eleventh year at a boarding school, and was completely wrong about the date of the birthday speech.  I contacted Koplev, who said that, at the time, no one had verified Allan’s background or identity.  He admitted that he himself harbored some doubts about the story.  “At the beginning of the broadcast, Allan said that he and his sister were identical twins.  Yet as a trained nurse, he ought to have known that identical twins are always of the same gender,” emphasized Koplev, who learned that Allan died shortly after the radio program.         

We agreed to investigate the case, but after several weeks Koplev got cold feet.  He was afraid of discrediting his program or weakening the credibility of other journalistic programs DBC had in the works about incest.  Nor did Tulle Koefoed – head of the Copenhagen Support Center against Incest, and the person who allegedly placed Koplev in contact with Allan – wish to help.

Allan unearthed

I began a robust, but ultimately fruitless investigation, obliging me in an article in the Weekendavisen of May 5-11, 2000, to concede that all clues had led to a dead end.  The article yielded several inquiries.  An elderly woman from Southern Jutland was fully persuaded that she had read Allan’s story in a novel or other literary work, but, despite a devoted search, the book could not be found.  Only two years later, when P1’s Lisbeth Jessen was in the midst of creating a radio montage of the puzzling tale, did something finally happen.    

Jessen managed to track down Allan in a provincial town in Southern Jutland to which he had moved after his appearance on Koplev’s Switchboard.  Allan had AIDS and had been sick for many years.  He had never seen The Celebration, nor had the thought ever crossed his mind that the film could have anything to do with his own personal history.  Jessen arranged a meeting with Vinterberg.  “It is strange that such a tragedy can give another man wings.  But this is precisely what happened,” said Vinterberg.  He claimed to have told Allan of the great significance of his story to so many people.  “Your story made people ponder the secrets in their own families – secrets which, of course, are not necessarily of the same character.  Your tapping of your glass and standing up has had repercussions that have yet to fade.”

“Now the circle is closed,” said Allan, relieved.

Allan unburdened

But the story did not end here.  As it were, Jessen could not find a gravestone for Pernille; she was also amazed that Allan did not have a single picture of his beloved sister.  Jessen then spoke with Allan’s uncle, who could not at all recognize Allan’s story.  Finally Allan made a confession:  his twin sister had never existed, the hotel had never existed, the birthday speech had never been given, and Allan had never been a victim of incest.

I met with Allan a few days after Jessen’s radio montage.  He preferred to remain anonymous.  He was proud to have contributed to The Celebration, but embarrassed about having fooled so many people with his lies.  “This is where people need to learn that you can’t simply take everything for the gospel truth,” he said.  “Maybe the sluices to the media are too open.  After all, I have actually seen that you can go all the way to the end and just say, ‘ha-ha.’  So then how many stories are merely cut out of whole cloth?”

But Allan’s story is not cut out of whole cloth.  He really did have a very hard childhood.  He and his three stepsiblings lived in an old, decrepit house situated alongside a hotel; his parents worked on “booze cruises” and often came home drunk; he had a very bad relationship with his now-deceased stepfather; and, later in life, he was afflicted by great personal woe.  His male partner died from AIDS in 1995, and shortly after Koplev’s Switchboard, Allan was hospitalized in a psychiatric clinic for, as he termed it, “shrieking bats in the belfry.” 

“I don’t know whether the fantasy in my head grew in power because I had been feeling so sick,” said Allan.  “I truly believe that this was simply the expression of all the negatives, all the worries, all the bad things in my life.  I was also inspired by my experiences in the health care field, but a lot of the story – the speech, for example – was cut out of whole cloth.  I can remember thinking at the end of the radio show: ‘Let me get out of this.  The time can’t go fast enough.’  I thought they would strip all the microphones from me and thump me in the head.”  Despite his obvious talent for storytelling, Allan never felt tempted to become a screenwriter.  “You can produce a hit only once in life,” he grinned. 

We’re not in the truth industry

The mystery surrounding The Celebration has been solved.

This was no media stunt; this was no conspiracy or wily attempt at self-promotion; this was simply a long series of coincidences which led, in the end, to the greatest film in the history of Danish cinema.  And many persons participated in the film’s fantastic story.  Allan delivered the substance; Koplev, with his style of interviewing and sense for the dramatic, got Allan to step into character as a storyteller; meanwhile, Rukov and Vinterberg shifted, on the one hand, the focus from incest to the family get-together and the suppression of secrets, and, on the other hand, created a nerve-wracking dramatic plot.    

That The Celebration is based on a fabrication does not lessen it in any way.  An artist may enjoy lying; indeed, the fantastic can be necessary to relate a general or more profound truth.  “We are not in the truth industry,” said Rukov.  “We are in the storytelling industry.  Every so often we come across something that is truer than the truth.  Every so often we see something in the world which follows the rules of storytelling.”

The journalistic world, however, has a different behavioral code.  Here we expect a truth based on facts.  We expect that the stories presented to us correspond to reality.  A program like Koplev’s Switchboard hinges upon whether we can put our trust in the people appearing on the program.  Of course, you can’t always guard against hucksters.  But if Koplev had done his research, Allan would have never come to the studio.  

On the other hand, there would also never have been The Celebration.

The Naval Treaty

What has become of the news?  Once upon a distant time, things occurred, events took place that evoked interest, pity, outrage, fear – all the common mantras of the common mind – and yet remained shrouded in mystery.  Details were not forthcoming; differing reports came to differing conclusions; and the news reader, the receptacle of emotion that was not quite his, participated in the story's development.  A robbery or other crime of greed had a thousand and one motives and perpetrators; an affair to remember was not quickly forgotten by half the country, and never forgotten by the other half; and the worst of all acts, the extinction of a human life, kindled in every heart remorse, anger, and thoughts of cruel vengeance because there are few things more exhilarating than avenging a stranger (one definition, I suppose, of a hero).  And no better vigilante for the victims of nefarious plots and abominable miscarriages of justice can be found than the protagonist of this classic tale.

As usual, Watson, that "stormy petrel of crime" brings what he deems to be a noteworthy case to his famous friend's attention.  In this instance Percy Phelps, an old school chum sufficiently well-connected in the Diplomatic office to have landed a plum position with his uncle, a "future premier of England," writes Watson in utter terror and desperation.  His plight?  To have become the unwitting accomplice to a most disastrous felony: that of a naval treaty that will realign two sets of triple powers – and since we are about a year away from the centennial of those trials of trust, I will say no more.  Tasked with copying the French-language treaty in the isolated confines of his office, Phelps's own description of that fateful eve is terrible enough:

I was feeling drowsy and stupid, partly from my dinner and also from the effects of a long day's work.  A cup of coffee would clear my brain.  A commissionnaire remains all night in a little lodge at the foot of the stairs, and is in the habit of making coffee at his spirit-lamp for any of the officials who may be working over time.  I rang the bell, therefore, to summon him.  To my surprise, it was a woman who answered the summons, a large, coarse-faced, elderly woman, in an apron.  She explained that she was the commissionnaire's wife, who did the charing, and I gave her the order for the coffee …. It is of the utmost importance that you should notice this point.  I went down the stairs and into the hall, where I found the commissionnaire fast asleep in his box, with the kettle boiling furiously upon the spirit-lamp.  I took off the kettle and blew out the lamp, for the water was spurting over the floor.  Then I put out my hand and was about to shake the man, who was still sleeping soundly, when a bell over his head rang loudly, and he woke with a start .... 'I was boiling the kettle when I fell asleep, sir.'  He looked at me and then up at the still quivering bell with an ever-growing astonishment upon his face.  'If you were here, sir, then who rang the bell?' he asked.  'The bell!' I cried.  'What bell is it?'  'It's the bell of the room you were working in.'  

That "a cold hand seemed to close round" the heart of Percy Phelps cannot shock us, for his life and career shall never be the same.  He retreats to the loving arms of his betrothed Annie Harrison, "a striking-looking woman, a little short and thick for symmetry," yet possessed of "a beautiful olive complexion, large, dark, Italian eyes, and a wealth of deep black hair."  By the handwriting ("a woman's, and a woman of rare character") Holmes divines that it was Annie who loved her future spouse enough as to call upon the most famous detective in England; it is also Annie whose presence and devotion have maintained Percy Phelps among the quick.  The duo proceeds with its usual methods, with the mystery of the telltale bell providing the most puzzlement.

If you know even a little about our story's author, you would not be surprised at the soliloquy interposed in The Naval Treaty, although among these tales it remains the only one of its kind.  Conan Doyle was routinely mocked for his spiritualist espousings, some of which waft into the rather dubious realm of necromancy; by and large, however, he was a Christian, if a very imaginative one.  Yet due to the preeminence allegedly allotted to physical science by his most famous fictional creation, as well as his own medical background, Conan Doyle wisely omitted his own personal religious views from these texts (and since his era was as befouled by skeptical hogos as is ours, such a tactic avoided another critical missile).  Instead, the reader may gather and arrange his own assumptions as to what Holmes and Watson, two inexorably moral minds, might have thought about such topics as the otherworld.  Which makes the former's odd non-sequitur all the more curious:   

'What a lovely thing a rose is!'  He walked past the couch to the open window, and held up the drooping stalk of a moss-rose, looking down at the dainty blend of crimson and green.  It was a new phase of his character to me, for I had never before seen him show any keen interest in natural objects.  'There is nothing in which deduction is so necessary as in religion,' said he, leaning with his back against the shutters.  'It can be built up as an exact science by the reasoner.  Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers.  All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are all really necessary for our existence in the first instance.  But this rose is an extra.  Its smell and its colour are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it.  It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers.'

A comment in my wondrous annotated volume deems Holmes ignorant of the usefulness of flowers and their pollen, but there is a certain caliber of mind which will never be able to comprehend beauty and practicality's eternal dissonance.  It is also upon this passage that ever-pragmatic Annie Harrison, "with a touch of asperity in her voice," enjoins Holmes to predict his success, to which he replies that he already has seven clues.  I count five or perhaps six, because I fear Holmes subsumes in his reckoning a clue that has actually yet to appear.  Or maybe he simply deduced the clue's existence in that fine manner already related.  You know, the one involving faith and reason and beauty.  And hope.    

From Hell

We are in the most extreme and utter region of the human mind.  A radiant abyss where men meet themselves.

Whatever we may believe of life and its aftermath, we all have some concept of damnation.  The nightmare may be as simple as a lonely, almost impeccably dark jail cell, or as complicated as a repetition of our mistakes over the course of thousands of years until a horrific realization comes upon us; it may even be the bottomless fire-and-brimstone mortar pit evoked by the soapbox preacher.  When someone claims to have no conception of hell or heaven, we should wonder whether he has ever really felt anything more than blood coursing through his veins.  I for one can picture hell in a variety of ways, because although the devil is supposed to be in the details, there are also varieties of inhuman experiences that attend our deepest fears.  We fear death, surely, but we fear repeated, agonizing, inextricable death even more.  Which is why you might never quite forget the images of this film.

While its title was famously used in a letter from this killer, a star in the pantheon of that nebulous arena known as "true crime," our film, despite its drawings from standard Ripperology, has little in the way of documentary.  We begin with an opium pipe, decadence, and the notion that everything we are about to witness could be nothing more than a mad dream.  It is but moments later that we descend into the filth that comprises certain parts of late nineteenth-century London, the lack of hygiene, morals, or hope.  In this case we speak of Whitechapel.  On every corner stands a pinch-prick or bang-tail (or in a perfect Victorian euphemism, an "unfortunate"); on every corner opposite looms a trick or handler.  Between them totter drunks and beggars, pickpockets and slowly dying workers that, were it not for the restraint of the directors, could have made for a scathing exposé on industrial poverty.  Our killer fits right in with all this, of course, "as quiet as the devil's laugh."  Hell could be Whitechapel; or it could be the opium den where we keep returning to that handsome fellow who probably thinks he's in heaven.  What is worse, knowing you are in hell, or being in hell and all the while thinking you are saved?   Both are suggested; and both, perhaps, are parts of the same nefarious realm.

The plot, as an interpretation of the events, is frighteningly simple.  An erstwhile unfortunate, Ann Crook (Joanna Page) has married and had a baby with someone of the upper class by the name of Albert.  A violent gang of operatives linked to his family gets wind of it, destroys their apartment, carries Albert off and makes Ann confess all names of those with knowledge of the baby.  Since these operatives are of a very persuasive brand, we are not surprised to learn that within a few short days of Ann's abduction one of her former colleagues is murdered in broadest darkness.  But she is not just murdered, she is butchered, and in spectacular fashion, the gruesome result suggesting a suspect well-versed in anatomy.  The flashes of steel on an otherwise black screen when the first victim is corralled will remain one of the great vignettes in the history of thrillers.  We then are provided with another view of what took place in a rapid reel so commonly incident to hallucinations and the wild daydreams of the addict, taking us back to that handsome man lying in the shape of a question mark on an opium den futon.  That man is Inspector Frederick Abberline (Johnny Depp), and he possesses what is known as second sight, if blurred by a rather virulent craving for laudanum and absinthe.  He is revived by his sidekick Godley (Robbie Coltrane), an immense bag of Shakespearean quotes and embarrassed gestures, and informed of the task at hand – which, as it were, has just begun to assume its diabolical contours. 

The complications of tracking the serial killer at large need not be spoiled on these pages, even if the story is familiar from urban legend.  Abberline and Godley poke around the crime scenes in the dawning hours of forensic science and suspect that a surgeon might be behind it all, even if some of their superiors recommend they question veterinarians, tailors, and, most of all, butchers.  At the same time, as yet undiscovered by our ersatz Holmes-and-Watson, the friends of Ann Crook and the first victim, Martha Tabram, wander about without fixed domicile or meals.  These include Katherine Eddowes, the mother-hen of the pullets, Liz Stride, the resident Sapphist, Annie Chapman, a particularly unhandsome addition, Polly Nichols, a gullible sort, and the lone Irishwoman in the group, Mary Kelly (Heather Graham).  A brief aside: even if we forget the sequence of crimes, does Mary Kelly really need to be the only one among the group of any attractiveness (highlighted, as it were, by a shock of red hair)?  Does the term "last girl" mean anything to the viewer?  In the horror film code, the last girl is invariably the only one who does not wander off into the darkness by herself looking for some frivolous object, as well as the only one who refuses to mock the imminent danger.  Such is the fate of Mary Kelly, who so outshines her companions – and, indeed, all of Whitechapel – that one would scarcely believe her line of work.  Once Tabram is killed, rumors begin about the foreignness of the matter (even the name "Tabram" is deemed foreign-sounding); Abberline's superior alternatively blames and exculpates the Jews, then makes a joke about "Red Indians indulging their natural inclinations."  A superior, by the way, who just so happens to be a high-ranking member, probably well towards the thirty-third degree, of a Masonic lodge where a great number of surgeons and men of power congregate far too often to be insignificant for our film.   

From Hell has suffered critically from what can be loosely termed great expectations.  That is to say, it is such a visual marvel that the impressed viewer could only be disappointed with a plain plot not unlike any straightforward slasher mayhem flick.  Since the film tries its damnedest to adhere to the historical detail extant – the order and method of the killings, as well as the real persons heading the investigation – there obtains the added unpleasantry of foreknowledge that dampens any real suspense.  I may sit gloriously in the minority, but these are petty obstacles.  Our killer is not so much revealed as summoned from the darkest annals of our nightmares, and given the striving towards known events, we know that our crime will remain to some degree unsolved.  Yet I think what has gained its greatest legion of detractors is an unadorned truth: evil may claim to be ingenious, multifaceted and abstruse, but at its core it wallows in the blandest mud.  How then to interpret the first written line of the film, ultimately its epigraph, as uttered by Jack himself: "One day men will look back and say I gave birth to the twentieth century"?  Perhaps by comparing that assertion with the one that began this essay from the on-screen Ripper's unshown mouth.  As Godley might then have whispered, some rise by sin and some by virtue fall.     

Rilke, "Kindheit"

A work ("Childhood") by this Austrian poet.  You can read the original here.

Both fear and time long since in school have seeped,  
To lurk in purely hollow things, undeep; 
O solitude, O irksomely spent time.   
And then they're outside: streets will sparge and chime,  
And on the squares fair fountains leap and climb,  
And in the gardens now our world grows wide; 
And through that all, in tiny dresses tied, 
So different from the others going, gone: 
O wondrous time, O time to spend as one; 
O solitude, O woe sublime.

And in all that, so far ahead to sight: 
Where men and women, men, men, women loom,   
And children, different and brightly hewn;  
And there's a house, and now and then a hound, 
And horror shifts to trust without a sound: 
O mourning without sense, O dream, O fright,  
O bottomless abyss of night. 

And playing thus: with ball and ring and tire 
Within a gently fading garden kept,   
And sometimes brushing by adults to race, 
Imbruted and so blind in hare-like haste;  
Yet quiet evenings come in slight, stiff steps,   
Back to the house, held firmly, to retire:  
O ever-fleeting understanding – wait. 
O fear, O burden great.  

And hours spent beside the great gray pond,  
There kneeling near a sailing ship so small;
Forgetting as still others, like ones, crawl,  
If comelier in sail, across the rings,  
And forced about that small pale face to think,   
As it resurfaces on water's bond:  
O childhood, O misled comparison: 
O wither then, O wither then?  

Blok, "О, я хочу безумно жить"

To Alexandra on her birthday, one of the greatest short poems ever written ("O, I so madly want to live"), the work of this Russian man of letters.  You can read the original here.

O, I so madly want to live:      
The realest to eternalize, 
The faceless to personify,   
The never-been sweet breath to give!

May heavy sleep destroy this life,   
And may I drown within these dreams;   
Perhaps some youth with joy so rife       
Will come to speak thus of my streams:

Forgive his sad and sullen might,
This cannot be his secret force;
He is the child of Good and Light,
He is our solemn freedom's course.