Poems and Songs

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Poems and Songs, by Bjornstjerne
Bjornson
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Title: Poems and Songs
Author: Bjornstjerne Bjornson
Release Date: October, 2004 [EBook #6619]
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[This file was first posted on January 1,
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Edition: 10
Language: English
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0. START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, POEMS AND
SONGS ***
This eBook was produced by Nicole Apostola.
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