Poems and Songs | Page 3

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