Unexpected Reunion

It just occurred to me that Johann Peter Hebel's amazing story "Unexpected Reunion" -- which Kafka famously called "the most wonderful story in the world -- is a version of Orpheus and Eurydice.  Or perhaps it might be called Eurydice and Orpheus, with all such a converse might apply.  At any rate it's the Eurydice figure who turns back, Eurydice who's been exiled in this world for all those years.

Ophuls' Black Orpheus, problematic as its real world construction is (for short: not the fact that it depicts an exotic celebration per se, but the exoticization of the actors), is still a brilliant and beautiful movie, and its most brilliant part is what Orpheus sees when he turns back: Eurydice as a very old woman.  What he sees is the truth of marriage, time, aging, death.  A truth, anyhow: the other truth is that these things are okay if one doesn't turn back, doesn't seek to turn back.  

In Hebel's story, too, the woman becomes very old, in her vast separation from her "young husband" ("θαλερὸς παρακοίτης," as Andromake calls Hektor).  But it is she who turns back to see his youth, and to mourn their lives and their parting, she who is more Eurydice than ever.

"With ships the sea was sprinkled far and nigh"

WITH ships the sea was sprinkled far and nigh,

Like stars in heaven, and joyously it showed;

Some lying fast at anchor in the road,

Some veering up and down, one knew not why.

A goodly vessel did I then espy

Come like a giant from a haven broad;

And lustily along the bay she strode,

Her tackling rich, and of apparel high.

The ship was nought to me, nor I to her,

Yet I pursued her with a lover's look;

This ship to all the rest did I prefer:

When will she turn, and whither? She will brook

No tarrying; where she comes the winds must stir:

On went she, and due north her journey took.

This sonnet has always haunted me, without my thinking much about why.  But today I realized it's the amazing twelfth line.  All the other lines are end-stopped (or could be) with no sentences ending midline.  But then we get that amazing caesura, just in the question about when the ship would turn: "When will she turn, and wither?"  And then the only enjambment, as she does turn, and another clausal ending after "tarrying" in line 13.  You read the last three lines as a kind of three line poem-within-the-poem, and they're pure blank verse in this Petrarchan sonnet.  The sense of enjambed, even Miltonic, blank verse -- except that it's purely Wordsworthian -- overlays and displaces the sonnet form that contains it, and that's what the ship is doing too -- brooking no tarrying, commanding the winds, sailing due north.