religious poetry in which his choice of rhythms, rhymes, and runes had
made it clear that he was a disciple of Grundtvig. In 1852, Thurah had
demonstrated a firm grasp of the complex art of versifying when he pub-
lished a new poetic rendering of the Song of Solomon under the titleThe
Rose of Sharon.
On September 27, 1855, he published a little pamphlet of just under
twenty pages, which could be purchased for twelve shillings. The pamphlet
bore the titleRhymed Epistle to Johannes the Seducer, Alias Dr. Søren Kierke-
gaard. The piece is painful testimony to the fact that Kierkegaard was taken
so seriously that people were compelled to turn to the most dreadful of all
weapons, ad hominem attacks, allusions to his physical person. The first
stanza runs as follows:
Come listen, brilliant bastard son,*
You with talent in your tongue,
As slick as any slimy eel,
As sharp as any blade of steel:
Instead of running all about
To shuffle and, alas, to putter
In every filthy, stinking gutter—
Let’s you and I play “Tag, you’re out!”* Who have degraded your father into a stud animal.The final volume of Kierkegaard’s journals contains no entries from the
latter part of September 1855, so we do not know whether he read Thurah’s
scurrilous poem. But it was in the collection of books Kierkegaard left at
his death, and he did mention Thurah while he was in the hospital, shortly
before he died. It is not difficult to understand why he would have men-
tioned him.
You dare so much, you dare as well
To put yourself where God does dwell,
All because you cannot stand
That God’s call comes from God’s own hand.
Sweet Satan’s monkey, tell me, whence
Cometh this intelligence?
A shame that you escaped God’s gaze
Until these very recent days.
For God would really find it sweet
To gather wisdom at your feet!