„Álom, álom, édes álom”

“Álom, álom, édes álom” is a lullaby-like refrain that makes sleep a force capable of quieting the world, yet reserves wakefulness for the lovers who wait for one another. Introduced in song and echoed by Csongor, it gives dream a double significance: a desired hush around the meeting of the beloveds, and a threshold at which waiting, absence, and the world beyond the lovers remain in view.

The Song and Its Wish

The passage is explicitly marked as a song. Its repeated invocation of dream asks it to descend over the quiet earth, and the next lines imagine every watchman closing their eyes. The wish is not for universal sleep without exception: the one exception is the beloved who is awaited and who waits in return. That balanced phrase turns the lullaby into a miniature image of reciprocal longing. The sleeping world is background and cover; the lovers’ mutual vigil is what the song protects.

The appeal to sleep thus carries a quiet tension. It seeks stillness for everyone on watch, but makes the lovers’ attention indispensable: they are not to be lulled with the rest. Sleep is at once an encompassing atmosphere and a condition that must not erase the meeting or expectation at the heart of the lyric. The song’s repeated words and simple progression—from dream, to the earth, to the sleeping watchmen, to the exception—give the wish the shape of an incantation.

Csongor’s Refrain

After the song, Csongor repeats its opening invocation. The echo links his own voice to the song’s imagined world of quiet and guarded wakefulness, turning the refrain from a general wish into something personally present in the dramatic scene. The text establishes the repetition, but does not specify a new action or explain his motive; its force lies in returning to the same words after the song has already defined whom sleep must leave awake.

That return also gives the phrase its memorable form. Rather than advancing through new information, it circles back to the appeal to dream, letting repetition itself sustain the lyric’s mood. In the play’s larger pattern, sleep can be more than a comforting image: a later chorus of dream, dream, sweet dream accompanies Csongor’s enchanted sleep, after which he misses Tünde. The refrain’s tender sound therefore stands beside a consequential dramatic possibility: sleep may offer repose, but it can also separate a seeker from the person he hopes to meet.

The Refrain in the Closing Image

The play’s ending returns to song and to the movement between presence and disappearance. The accompanying maidens gradually withdraw until they can no longer be seen; then the golden apple falls, and a song is heard from a distance, beginning with the words that midnight has come and that the night is cold and sad. This ending does not repeat the lullaby verbatim, but its distant song recalls the earlier refrain’s nocturnal atmosphere and its language of sleep and waiting.

The contrast matters: the earlier lyric imagines a quiet earth arranged around lovers who remain awake for one another, while the closing stage direction lets the visible attendants recede and leaves a song coming from far away. The falling golden apple supplies a concrete stage action at the moment of transition, while the remote voice carries the ending beyond what remains visible. Together, these moments make the refrain part of a wider sound pattern in which dream and song can shelter longing, mark a character’s vulnerability to sleep, and accompany the movement from presence toward absence.