I cannot tell why this imagined
Despair has fallen upon me;
The ghost of an ancient legend
That will not let me be.

These lines are commonly encountered in English as part of a translation of Heinrich Heine’s famous Lorelei poem, in which a speaker describes an unaccountable melancholy and a haunting “ancient legend” that preoccupies him. Heine wrote the poem in the early 1820s, drawing on Rhine River folklore about the Lorelei rock near St. Goarshausen and the siren-like figure said to lure boatmen to their deaths. The opening mood—private despair triggered by a cultural tale—sets up the poem’s shift from inward unease to a narrated legend, linking personal emotion to the power of inherited myth.

The speaker’s “imagined despair” suggests a sadness that feels both irrational and irresistible: he cannot justify it, yet it presses on him. By calling it the “ghost of an ancient legend,” the poem frames folklore as a living psychological force—stories persist beyond their origins and can possess the imagination like a haunting. The lines also foreshadow the Lorelei’s fatal allure: the legend’s grip on the mind parallels the siren’s grip on the senses. More broadly, Heine captures a Romantic tension between modern self-awareness (“I cannot tell why”) and the enduring, irrational power of tradition, landscape, and myth.