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POEMS AND SONGS
BY BJÖRNSTJERNE BJÖRNSON
TRANSLATED FROM THE NORWEGIAN
IN THE ORIGINAL METERS
BY
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.
II
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.