Scene 3, the sufferings of the wounded Tristan are depicted in a theme

composed wholly of descending half-steps,

and note, too, that the closing cadence of the short phrase which stands for the love-glance is a downward leap of seven degrees. In this phrase, as we first hear it, there is much tenderness and gentle happiness; but in the glance there was the phantom of that Life-in-Death who won Coleridge's Ancient Mariner from the grisly skeleton in their awful game of dice. Though we do not suspect it, at first, that downward leap of a seventh is an ominous symbol--the symbol of Fate, which might have been heard under the yearning voices of the prelude, and is now proclaimed by the gloomy basses in the scene wherein Isolde selects the poison from the casket of philters which her mother had given in charge of Brangäne:

There is another phrase of tragic puissance with which we must now get acquainted. At the first glance which Isolde throws upon Tristan, motionless at the helm of the ship, when the curtains are parted to permit the maid to summon the knight into the presence of the princess, this phrase publishes her dreadful determination to seek revenge for outraged love in murder and suicide. It is the symbol of death, whose relationship to the symbol of fate will easily be recognized: