Poems and Songs

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Poems and Songs, by Bjornstjerne Bjornson
Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing this or any other Project Gutenberg eBook.
This header should be the first thing seen when viewing this Project Gutenberg file. Please do not remove it. Do not change or edit the header without written permission.
Please read the "legal small print," and other information about the eBook and Project Gutenberg at the bottom of this file. Included is important information about your specific rights and restrictions in how the file may be used. You can also find out about how to make a donation to Project Gutenberg, and how to get involved.
**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**
**eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**
*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****
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
Character set encoding: ASCII
? START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, POEMS AND SONGS ***
This eBook was produced by Nicole Apostola.
POEMS AND SONGS?BY BJ?RNSTJERNE BJ?RNSON
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?BJ?RNSON 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 Bj?rnson 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 Bj?rnson 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 Bj?rnson 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 Bj?rnstjerne Bj?rnson. 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. Bj?rnson 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 Bj?rnson 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 Bj?rnson 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 Bj?rnson's labors and achievements in the domain of action more narrowly considered, it is no wonder that his Poems