Poems and Songs | Page 4

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