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Title: Poems and Songs

Author: Bjornstjerne Bjornson

Release Date: October, 2004 [EBook #6619] [Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]

[This file was first posted on January 1, 2003]

Edition: 10

Language: English

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, POEMS AND SONGS ***

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POEMS AND SONGS BY BJÖRNSTJERNE BJÖRNSON

TRANSLATED FROM THE NORWEGIAN

IN THE ORIGINAL METERS

ARTHUR HUBBELL PALMER

Professor of the German Language and Literature

In Yale University

New York

The American-Scandinavian Foundation

London: Humphrey Milford

Oxford University Press

1915

INTRODUCTION BJÖRNSON AS A LYRIC POET

I lived far more than e'er I sang;

Thought, ire, and mirth unceasing rang

Around me, where I guested;

To be where loud life's battles call

For me was well-nigh more than all

My pen on page arrested.

What's true and strong has growing-room,

And will perhaps eternal bloom,

Without black ink's salvation,

And he will be, who least it planned,

But in life's surging dared to stand,

The best bard for his nation.

A life seventy-seven years long and but two hundred pages of lyrical production, more than half of

which was written in about a dozen years! The seeming disproportion is explained by the lines just

quoted from the poem Good Cheer , with which Björnson concluded the first edition of his Poems

and Songs . Alongside of these stanzas, in which the cause of his popularity and powerful influence

is also unconsciously revealed, may well be placed the following one from The Poet , which

discloses to us the larger conception of the mission that Björnson himself in all his work and life, no

less than in his lyrics, so finely fulfilled:

The poet does the prophet's deeds;

In times of need with new life pregnant,

When strife and suffering are regnant,

His faith with light ideal leads.

The past its heroes round him posts,

He rallies now the present's hosts,

The future opes

Before his eyes,

Its pictured hopes

He prophesies.

Ever his people's forces vernal

The poet frees, —by right eternal.

"The best bard for his nation" is he who "does the prophet's deeds," who "rallies now the present's

hosts," and "frees, —by right eternal." Poet and prophet Björnson was, but more than all else the

leader of the Norwegian people, "where loud life's battles call," through conflict unto liberation and

growth. It has been said that twice in the nineteenth century the national soul of Norway embodied

itself in individual men,—during the first half in Henrik Wergeland and during the second half in

Björnstjerne Björnson. True as this is of the former, it is still more true of the latter, for the history

of Norway shows that the soul of its people expresses itself best through will and action. Björnson

throughout all his life willed and wrought so much for his country, that he could give relatively little

time and power to lyrical self-expression.

But Björnson strikingly represented the past of Norway as well as his contemporary age. He was a

modern blending of the heroic chieftain and the gifted skald of ancient times. He was the first leader

of his country in a period when the battles of the spirit on the fields of politics and economics,

ethics, and esthetics were the only form of conflict,—a leader evoking, developing, and guiding the

powers of his nation into fuller and higher life. In his many-sidedness Björnson was also in his time

the first skald of his people, almost equally endowed with genius as a narrative, a dramatic, and a

lyric poet; with talents scarcely less remarkable as an orator, a theater-director, a journalistic tribune

of the people (his newspaper articles amounted, roughly estimated, to ten thousand book-pages), a

letter-writer, and a conversationalist.

If, furthermore, we take into account also Björnson's labors and achievements in the domain of

action more narrowly considered, it is no wonder that his Poems and Songs make only a small

volume. Examining the book more closely, we find that three-quarters of its pages were written

before the year 1875, so that the lyrical output, here published, of the thirty-four years thereafter

amounts to but fifty pages. From the year 1874 on in Björnson's life the chieftain supplanted the

skald, so far as lyrical utterance was concerned. He was leading his nation in thought and action on

the fields of theology and religion, of politics, economics, and social reform; he was tireless in

making speeches, in writing letters and newspaper articles; his poetic genius flowed out copiously

in the dramatic and epic channels of his numerous modern plays, novels, and stories.

That soon after 1874 Björnson passed through a crisis in his personal thought and inner life was

probably, in view of the sufficient explanation suggested above, without influence in lessening his

production of short poems. This crisis was in his religious beliefs. His father was a clergyman in the

Lutheran State Church, and from his home in western Norway Björnson brought with him to

Christiania in 1850 fervent Christian faith of the older orthodox sort. Here his somewhat somber

religion was soon made brighter and more tender by the adoption of Grundtvig's teachings, and

until past mid-life he remained a sincere Christian in the fullest sense, as is repeatedly shown in his

lyrics. But in the years just before 1877 study of modern science and philosophy, of the history of

the Church and dogma, led him to become an evolutionist, an agnostic theist. Nevertheless, he ever

practiced the Christian art of life, as he tried to realize his ideals of truth, justice, and love of

humanity. This large and simple Christian art of life, in distinction from the dogmas of the Church,

he early sung in lines which sound no less true to the keynote of his later years:

Love thy neighbor, to Christ be leal!

Crush him never with iron-heel,

Though in the dust he's lying!

All the living responsive await

Love with power to recreate,

Needing alone the trying.

The quantity, then, of Björnson's short poems is small. Their intrinsic worth is great. Their influence

in Norway has been broad and deep, they are known and loved by all. If lyrical means only

melodious, "singable," they possess high poetic value and distinction. In a unique degree they have

inspired composers of music to pour out their strains. When a Scandinavian reads Björnson's

poems, his ears ring with the familiar melodies into which they have almost sung themselves.

Here is not the place for technical analysis of the external poetic forms. A cursory inspection will

show that Björnson's are wonderfully varied, and that the same form is seldom, if ever, precisely

duplicated. In rhythm and alliteration, rhyme sequence and the grouping of lines into stanzas, the

form in each case seems to be determined by the content, naturally, spontaneously. Yet for one who

has intimately studied these verses until his mind and heart vibrate responsively, the words of all

have an indefinable melody of their own, as it were, one dominant melody, distinctly Björnsonian.

This unity in variety, spontaneous and characteristic, is not found in the earlier poems not included

in this volume. So far as is known, Björnson's first printed poem appeared in a newspaper in 1852.

It and other youthful rhymes of that time extant in manuscript, and still others as late as 1854, are

interesting by reason of their contrast with his later manner; the verse-form has nothing personal,

the melodies are those of older poets. It is in the lyrics of Synnöve Solbakken , written in 1857 or just

before, that Björnson for the first time sings in his own forms his own melody.

Style and diction are the determining factors in the poetic form of lyric verse, along with the

perhaps indistinguishable and indefinable quality of melodiousness. Of Björnson's style or manner

in the larger sense it must be said that it is not subjectively lyrical. He is not disposed to

introspective dwelling on his own emotions and to profuse self-expression without a conscious

purpose. In general he must have some definite objective end in view, some occasion to celebrate

for others, some "cause" to champion, the mood of another person or of other persons, real or

fictitious, to reproduce synthetically in a combination of thoughts, feelings, similes, and sounds. In

his verses words do not breed words, nor figures beget figures unto lyric breadth and vagueness.

When Björnson was moved to make a poem, he was so filled with the end, the occasion, the cause,

the mood to be reproduced, that he was impatient of any but the most significant words and left

much to suggestion. Often the words seem to be in one another's way, and they are not related with

grammatical precision. Thus in the original more than in the translation of the poem Norway,

Norway! the first strophe of which is: Norway, Norway, Rising in blue from the sea's gray and

green, Islands around like fledglings tender, Fjord-tongues with slender Tapering tips in the silence

seen. Rivers, valleys, Mate among mountains, wood-ridge and slope Wandering follow. Where the

wastes lighten, Lake and plain brighten, Hallow a temple of peace and hope. Norway, Norway,

Houses and huts, not castles grand, Gentle or hard, Thee we guard, thee we guard, Thee, our future's

fair land.

Such abrupt brevity of expression, not uncommon among Norwegian peasants, was no doubt

natural to Björnson, but was confirmed by the influence of the Old Norse sagas and skaldic poetry.

The latter may also have increased his use of alliteration, masterly not only in the direct imitation of

the old form, as in Bergliot , but also in the enrichment of the music of his rhymed verse in modern

forms. Conciseness of style in thought and word permitted no lyrical elaboration of figures or

descriptions; it restricted the poet to brief hints of the ways his spirit would go, and along which he

wished to guide that of the hearer or reader. Herein is the source of much of the power of Björnson's

patriotic songs and poems of public agitation. Those who read or hear or sing them are made to

think, or at least to feel, the unwritten poetry between the lines. Scarcely less notable is this paucity

in the expression of wealth of thought and feeling in the memorial and other more individual

poems.

Björnson's diction corresponds to the quality of style thus briefly characterized. The modern

Norwegian language has no considerable, highly developed special vocabulary for poetic use. From

the diction of prose the poet must quarry and carve the verbal material for his verse. It sometimes

seems, indeed, as if it were hard for Björnson to find the right block and fit it, nicely cut, into his

line. In describing his diction critics have used the figures of hewing and of hammer-strokes, but

then have said that it is not so much laborious effort we hear as the natural falling into place of

words heavy with thought and feeling. Here it is that translation must so often come short of faithful

reproduction. The choice of words in relation to rhythm and euphony is a mystery difficult to

interpret even in the poet's own language. If we try to analyze the verse of great poets, we

frequently find, beyond what is evidently the product of conscious design, effects of suggestion and

sound which could not be calculated and designed. The verbal material seems hardly to be

amenable to the poet's control, but rather to be chosen, shaped, and placed involuntarily by the

thought and the mood. The Ocean is a good example of the distinctive power and beauty of

Björnson's diction.

Such, then, in melody, rhythm, style, and diction is the form of Björnson's verse: compact, reticent,

suggestive, without elaborate verbal ornamentation, strong with "the long-vibrating power of the

deeply felt, but half-expressed." It challenges and stimulates the soul of the hearer or reader to an

intense activity of appropriation, which brings a fine reward.

III

What, now, is the content that finds expression in this form? As we turn the pages from the

beginning, we first meet lyrics that may be called personal, not utterances of Björnson's individual

self, but taken from his early tales and the drama Halte Hulda , with strains of love, of religious

faith, of dread of nature, and of joy in it, of youthful longing; then after two patriotic choral songs

and a second group of similar personal poems from A Happy Boy follow one on a patriotic subject

with historical allusions, a memorial poem on J. L. Heiberg, and one descriptive, indeed, of the

ocean, but filled with the human feelings and longings it arouses; then come a lyric personal to

Björnson, and one that is not. As we progress, we pass through a similar succession of descriptive,

personal, or memorial poems, some of religious faith, historical ballads, lyrical romances, patriotic

and festival choral songs, poems in celebration of individual men and women, living or dead, and

towards the end poems, like the Psalms , of deep philosophic thought suffused with emotion.

Now these subjects may be gathered into a small number of groups: love, religious faith and

thought, moods personal to the poet, patriotism,—love of country, striving for its welfare, pride in

Norway's history, and joy in the beauty and grandeur of its scenery. The occasional songs and

poems in celebration of great personalities, —whether they were of high station and renown, or

lowly and unfamed, —or for festivals, earnest or jovial, are nearly all conceived in the spirit of

patriotism,—love of Norway, its historic past, its present, its future. They may be social songs

memorial or political poems, ballads or lyrical romances,—all are inspired by and inspire love of

country.

Not very many of Björnson's lyrics have love as their subject. From his tales, novels, and dramas

we know that his understanding of love was comprehensive and subtle, yet this volume contains but

few of the love-lyrics of strong emotion, which Björnson must have felt, if not written. He was a

man of will and action with altruistic ideals; sexual love could not be the whole nor the center of

life for him.

Nor are the purely religious poems numerous, although Christian faith is at once the ground and the

atmosphere of his lyrics in the earlier period, and some of the latest are expressions of a broad and

deep philosophy of life. "Love thy neighbor!" and "Light, Love, Life" in deeds were characteristic

of Björnson, rather than the utterance of passive meditations of a theoretic nature on God and man's

relation to Him.

Björnson's unfailing bent towards activity in behalf of others could not favor either the lyric

outpouring of other purely personal moods. Such purely personal poems are then also relatively

rare. Some of them, however, are most beautiful and deeply moving. Generally he frees himself in

an epic or dramatic way from subjective introspection; he projects his feeling into another

personality or sends it forth in choral song in terms of "we" and "our." The moods he does express

more directly for himself are vague youthful longing for the great and the instant, joyous

trustfulness even in adversity and under criticism, love of parents, wife, family, and friends, faith in

the future and in the power of the good to prevail.

By far the largest number of the Poems and Songs have as their subject patriotism in the broadest

sense, a theme at once simple and complex. It is in them that the skald and chieftain so typically

blend in one. Of this group the influence has been widest and deepest. In his oration at the unveiling

of the statue of Wergeland in Christiania, Björnson spoke of him and of Norway's constitution as

growing up together; with reference to this it has been maintained that we have still greater right to

say that Björnson and Norway's full freedom and independence grew up together. The truth of the

statement is very largely due to Björnson's patriotic poems. Through them the poet-prophet

interpreted for his nation the historic past and the evolving present, and forecast the future.

Simplifying the meaning of life, he accomplished the mission which he himself made the ideal of

The Poet , and became for his own people the liberalizing teacher and molder, leading them to

freedom in thought and action, in social and political life. Of this large and seemingly complex

group of patriotic lyrics,—whether they be on its history, or on contemporaneous events and deeds

of individuals with political significance; or on men, both known and unknown to fame, who had

made and were making Norway great; or on historical, political, and other national festivals; or on

the country, its land and sea and fjords and forests and fields and cities, in aspects more genial or

more stern, —whether they be poems of the individual or social and choral songs, manorial poems

or ballads or lyrical romances, or descriptions of Norway's scenery,—the unifying simple theme is

Norway to be loved and labored for.

Not a single poem is, however, merely descriptive of external nature. Björnson's relation to nature is

indeed more intimate than that of any other Norwegian writer of his time, but here also he is epic

and dramatic rather than subjectively lyrical. He sees and hears through what is external, and his

feeling for and with nature is but a profounder looking into the soul of his nation or the inner life of

other human beings. For him Norway's scenery is filled with the glory of the nation's past, the

promise of its future, or the needs of the present. The poems that contain nature descriptions are

primarily patriotic. In the national hymn Yes, We Love , it is the nation, its history and its future,

which with the land towers as a whole before his vision; in Romsdal the scenery frames the people,

their character and life. More personal poems, as To Molde or A Meeting , are not merely descriptive;

in the former childhood's memories and the love of friends fill the scene, while in the latter the

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