Karen Blixen - Isak Dinesen home

Question 52: Significance of "Where'er you walk"?

Q. Does the Handel song "Where'er you walk" from the opera Semele have
any connection to Karen Blixen?

A. In The Life and Destiny of Karen Blixen, her secretary, Clara Svendsen, says that Denys Finch Hatton used to sing the song to Karen Blixen. She also says that Karen Blixen listened to a recording of this aria from Semele shortly before her death (on September 7, 1962).

(Her record player had been installed in the studded Mombasa chest Farah gave her. This chest can be seen today in her sitting room at Rungstedlund, adorned daily by an exquisite bouquet of fresh flowers.)

Karen Blixen quotes the phrase in her "Oration at a Bonfire, Fourteen Years Late" (p.74) [Daguerreotypes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979]:
 

"There is an old English love poem in which the lover says to his beloved,

Where'er you walk, cool gales shall fan the glade,
Trees where you sit shall crowd into a shade...." (p. 74)


[The end note (p. 222) states that the phrase comes from the poem "Pastorals" by Alexander Pope (1709, "Summer," II. 73-74).]

Copyright © 2002 by Linda Donelson. All rights reserved