SOURCE: "Listening to the Voices," in Voices Under the Ground: Themes and Images in the Early Poetry of Gunnar Ekelöf, University of California Press, 1973, pp. 1-34.

Gunnar Ekelöf's poem "Voices Under the Ground," published in In Autumn (1951) has been only casually touched upon by Swedish critics, yet it is one of Ekelöf's major poems. In it many of the crucial themes and images of the first twenty years of his poetry reach full fruition, for, with complete technical mastery, he draws upon the unconscious to symbolize and to identify his concern with dreams and with man's alienated and mortal consciousness. At first this poem seems like an incomprehensible dialogue between voices under the ground, with some unidentified observer above the ground. Upon further analysis, however, the poem has the unified structure of a dream and the dialogue represents a dialogue within the narrator's own consciousness.

This seemingly unstructured poem has a rather clear framekwork that can be outlined in musical terms, but the full depth of the poem is illuminated only when we see how Ekelöf uses symbols such as the bird and the stone within the structure of a dream. Ultimately, the poem deals in archetypal imagery with the narrator's lack of a space that he can comfortably inhabit and with his ambivalence toward death."…

The title "Voices Under the Ground" gives some idea of what is to be expected. The most probable "voices" one might hear, or imagine hearing, under the ground are those of the dead. The image in the title also creates a concept of planes or levels. To suggest an "under" is to imply an "over" or above. Assuming the voices are coming from the dead, and given the title, the reader's first assumption is probably just that, the possibility is set up for a listener, for someone hearing the voices, presumably someone on the earth's surface.

Within the first stanza of the poem, there are two different styles, one that seems rather objective, and another that is subjective. The difference between the styles is emphasized by the identing dash, often performing the function of quotation marks. The first style is that of the opening lines.

Common and simple sentence structure is used in the first three lines as typified by the use of the definite article in the first line and followed by the "It is…" of the next two lines. The lines, I suggest, are spoken from the most uninvolved level, by a narrator or the poet if one wishes to personify that level.

The next line, idented, is difficult to separate from the preceding lines, although it does seem less objective and the sentence structure is not as plain. The words imply someone who sees and evaluates, but someone other than the first person speakers of the following two lines. One theory could be that the first three lines represent thoughts of the narrator, while the next sentence may be spoken aloud by the same person.

With the two "I long from…" lines the first-person statement and vocabulary is almost colloquial. These two lines, it is presumed, represent the voices referred to in the title.

Basically, the two styles or tones within the poem are differentiated by third and first person speakers. Occasional passages are difficult to place, but these become clearer as our reading of the poem progresses. The first plane is that of the objective narrator or the stage-setter. It is this objective narration that may be considered upon or above the earth's surface, whereas the voices are beneath. This analogy will break down later, but it allows the reader to follow the poem somewhat more easily on a first reading.

Studying the poem from the viewpoint of levels or planes, decreases the importance of determining the identity and the number of the speakers. I find it easiest to read it as simply two voices in a dialogue, but since there is no clear way of verifying this, it may be read as a series of voices listening to one another and chiming in with comments. After the stage is set by the narrator, the two voices continue in a dialectical question and answer method. For purposes of convenience, I shall label the first speaker, voice A, and the second, voice B.

If a generalization could be made from this point, the poem would be called essentially "associative" with a major portion forming a dialogue of the type presentday readers know as "absurd." It is distinctly a twentieth-century poem in that it lacks a traditional beginning and ending and presents a slice, rather than a complete picture, of a universe that lacks light, center, or surface.

A close reading of the poem is helpful to establish a basic foundation of agreement and to lead into a more precise idea than the generalizations above. After the two lines of longing at the conclusion of the first stanza, there is a long stanza that returns to the third person narrative and repeats in its final lines a resumé of the opening lines. It can be assumed, therefore, that we are back to the observing level of the narrator.

The contents of the lines reinforce this assumption, since they continue to fill the visual stage of the poem. The opening lines were abstract and not localized apart from the morning light and the floors of drugstores. In these lines the poem becomes populated. A young man, a pale girl, and additional details are added, such as the flowers in the window.

These concrete phenomena are left open to the reader's imagination and he is invited to use it: "she exists only in connection with her hand which exists only in connection with…" This invitation to the reader's imagination is extended by means of the bird. The association lies in the movement of the girl's hands and the bird's flight, and in posing the question of the relation or connection between one thing and another. The old woman and the man at the desk seem to be further details on what I refer to as the stage as well as examples of the problem of relationship.

No reason is given to connect these various singular entities, but the child at the blackboard reintroduces the question of relationship. Once again the association and the question are posed in terms of a hand apparently in motion, then of things related to the scene. The entire passage is summarized with "Where is the hand?" and with the references to the flowers, time, morning light and, finally, the black-white checkered floors.

The summary of this scene reminds the reader that a group of characters have been seen, almost as if they were on stage, but no plot, no reason to connect them have been given. Instead, the reader has been asked to consider what it is that unites them on this particular black and white stage.

Before we are given a chance to consider that scene, however, we are drawn into a converstion. The objectivity and narrative quality of the first section is dropped. "What a lovely name!" is a colloquial and evaluative phrase and the first person "My" of "My bird" verifies that we are overhearing a conversation. The two voices, who are familiar with each other, are discussing the extinct primeval bird the archaeopteryx. The discussion at first has no apparent connection with the opening passage, but the references to flying and to light remind us of it.

A conversation about an extinct bird that is alive need not be illogical, if it is agreed that the voices actually are under the earth. Then an ageless sense of petrification, of time's progression in thousand-year beats is quite comprehensible. The voices identify with the stone of the earth and seem to feel an interchangeability between themselves and everything else that is within the stone. The dominant theme of the passage is the osmotic quality given to stone, envisioned possibly as a thick doughy substance or liquid, with the voice, lizards, birds, and presumably an infinity of dead life existing in it.

There is, however, a subtheme reminiscent of the opening passage. The concept of "connection" of "relation" continues by the absence-presence of the bird, and the same verb, flight, is used to pose the question. This theme of relation is further developed by creating a tension between the voice that is forced to remain "bound to the stone" and the bird "with its flight." Once it is created, this picture of voice, bird, stone, and their union, is broken.

One of the voices wanted to know something from the bird. We do not know what. The bird has the capacity to influence the speakers. "The bird took my wings and gave them to another light. The light went out." Although we do not know what the relation is between the bird and the speakers, we can see that the dialectical method of the poem is worked out more clearly here. The lines are reduced in length, and we can see a questioner and an answerer. Speaker A, the one who longs for the bird and who asked it for something, fears the emptiness and darkness of the pitlike abyss. Speaker B apparently delights in telling A of the confusing chaos that we begin to suspect is the universe. The description extends out to "the house of the stars," then back to the original area, "Birds and shellfish sleep there like you…"

The image of the stone is given even greater range. It becomes like a pulsing heart.

With thousand-year beats beat the'r hearts of stone
in veins of stone.
For yearbillions of stone time swirls them with itself
in raging storms of stone through seas of stone
to heavens of stone…

The intensity of this experience becomes comparable to the pounding of one's heart during a nightmare. The imagery extends itself to the limits of the universe and then abruptly returns, apparently illogically to the speakers. A asks, almost as if he were awaking, "Where am I? Where are you?" B tells him to "Wake up!" The complexity of A's awakening is that there seems to be no difference between reality and nightmare. He repeats his earlier question, "Is there no forgetfulness in the house of the abyss?" This question leads into a scene suggestive of a hospital and again is extended to a terrifying point of chaos. "Everything lies on its back, everything turns again and again on its back." Darkness is again a crucial aspect, and here, in the form of night, it becomes a frightening element climbing floor after floor of some unspecified building, possibly the hospital suggested earlier.

Speaker A abruptly takes us back to the black and white floors of the opening scene. The heart is now mentioned in the simile of the radiator, and the black and white floors are connected with the underlying "loneliness" theme of the absurd dialogue. With one more image filled with movement and implying chaos, "darkness rushes around the gables of the house," the opening scene is reestablished, with basically one character on stage: death.

Almost as a refrain the entire poem is summarized in the last four lines which give both the objective narrator and the two voices.

Having completed a general summary of the poem, one remains somewhat vague and confused about the poem as a whole. Certain scenes are easily visualized, but to put the opening and closing sections into some kind of meaningful relationship with the central dialogue is difficult."…

In "Voices," after the image of the morning light and the black and white checkered floors, there is the bitter but perhaps also pensive "tired as never years and days to death …" This line is immediately followed by a speaker, "I long from the black square to the white," who refers to the floors that resemble a chessboard. "I long from the red thread to the blue" is spoken by a second speaker. I suggest that it is the author's imaginary second self.

Let me refer to my initial introduction of these lines. I noted that the objectivity, traditional grammatical structure, and lack of colloquial language suggested a narrator, someone we might call an uninvolved perceiver. Now read this as the objective author whose thoughts appear in the next lines, "Silently, the morning light shrugs away the drug of sleep. Then he begins to play an intellectual game with himself"…

A review of the poem along the above lines is useful at this point. It is easier to follow the poem if it is thought of as divided into levels or planes as I first suggested. A personification of those levels, however, would put the poet describing and thinking on one level, the outer or objective, and the two imaginary opponents on the second or inner level. Dividing the poem this way may seem a dubious method, but it can provide a fruitful way of looking at the themes and methods employed in the poem. The poet-narrator opens the poem. He describes, then thinks to himself, but as he sees the floor, he imagines his chess game, imagines he can hear the two speakers.

The poet pensively returns to an objective scene, but he keeps demanding of its elements some coherence or cogency that, apart from the passage of time, they do not have. The grammatical and syntactical differences, as I have noted, support this interpretation. The third person emphasis of "That young man" down to "with the black-white checkered floors" contrasts with the more human first person passages that precede and follow it. The observations of the third person are either critical, "there is something wrong with his face," unresolved, "which exists only in connection with…," or questioning, such as the hand and the chalk.

If the two voices are in fact part of a fictitious inner dialogue, we should expect some carryover between the objective world of the poet and the conversation. This connection may be seen in the bird that flies "With its flight" in the observed passage, yet is extinct, made of stone, in the dialogue passage. There are other obvious similarities such as the verb "come back" and the essential questioning in both passages of the relation between things: what does the hand "exist in connection with," and what is the relation between the archaeopteryx and the speakers?

After this initial transition into the world below the black and white floors, the dialectic of the conversation becomes clearer. The transition itself must be seen as establishing the concept of time as a predominant theme. It was obvious in the objective world of the narrator, "Hours pass," and it is in the dialogue with its themes of extinction and petrification.

This "time" theme has ramifications that can be extended from my opening discussion of the poem. I suggested that the title automatically inferred an above and a below and quite possibly the living and the dead. This assumption is not necessarily discredited by interpreting the poem as occurring within the poet's consciousness. As he begins playing chess within his thoughts, he allows the central concerns of his mind to develop the patterns of the game.

The narrator begins with "time" and "connection" but allows his image, the black-white checkered floors, to influence him. He imagines a dialogue among the dead and continues his concern with the relation between meaning and time. If a bird above the earth is the symbol of freedom, as implied in the objective stage of the poem, then it is possible a bird would be the same symbol to the dead. An extinct bird makes the contrast explicit.

Through the image of the bird we are led into the debate of the two speakers. Their central problem is their inability to move, a fact more painful to them because "the bird is free." It can fly. Speaker A says, "I myself am bound to the stone, the primal stone." Oddly enough, from the earlier chirping of the bird and the fact that it cannot sleep, it is difficult for us to determine whether the bird can actually fly or simply represents flight. The clearest point is that the speaker identifies with stone, but would rather identify with the bird. The reason for this preference becomes clear in the next section beginning with "Is there no forgetfulness in the house of the abyss?"

The value of my suggestion that the voices are opposing voices within the poet himself becomes clearer in reference to this passage. Dialogues about the absurdity of the world and the universe are hardly original to this century, but this century has certainly overworked them. If the poem is simply an imagined conversation of the dead about the absurdity of the universe, it lacks originality and is somewhat confusing. If, however, it can be read not only at the above level, but at the level of the individual and his conscious and unconscious conflicts, the meaning of the poem is greatly expanded. The possibility of a "collective unconscious" becomes a major addition through such an interpretation.

The reason this extension occurs is that the narrator, that is, the individual human, becomes a sphere containing voices, dead and alive, just as the earth is such a sphere, and possibly the universe. Discussion of this sphere is the basis of the dialogue between the two speakers. Most of this dialogue can be studied as occurring either within the narrator or, in a more abstract fashion, simply in the universe. The quality of the dialogue is reminiscent of what we find in absurd theater, yet it preceded Waiting for Godot (1952). Initially, A and B establish a surfaceless abyss in which lamps hold useless watch over stone. "This is hell! No, it is emptiness. And the house of the stars is empty…" represents a transition outward and away from the downward thrust of the previous part of the poem.

Previously, the bird was an ideal and the context of the poem was the earth or beneath. As the dialogue progresses, however, stone is retained but extended outward in a spiral of endless time. The emptiness of the universe is compared to stone, "For yearbillions of stone time swirls them with itself in raging storms of stone through seas of stone to heavens of stone." With these explicit lines the universe itself is envisioned as a petrified substance, an earth of rock rippling outward like circles in a pool. The effect of this image upon A is to put him to sleep, in a sense to hypnotize him into the spiral of stone. He is dazed and asks, "Where am I? Where are you?"

Speaker B wakes up A but their conversation immediately returns to the same subject, "the house of the abyss." Now, however, the imagery is centered upon scenes familiar to the average man. No longer is it beneath the earth nor in the sky, but almost at the level of the opening passage, a city building, where the two speakers discuss their world. The implied characters may have something to do with the opening characters. "And all these invalids who drift homeless around the rooms." The use of repetition and the apparent chaos of the scene combine qualities from the previous passages.

Light or its absence is once again crucial. "Is it night or day?" This night image is added to the city building and is seen flooding upward, again a motion reminiscent of the spiral. The passage openly poses the battle of light against dark.

It throbs in the radiators like a strained heart.
the lamps blink dead when they offer opposition
and try to hold back the darkness.
A white loneliness against a black loneliness.

The black and white lonelinesses refer to the floors and to the concept of a game or battle. The final lines of this section possibly represent the returning integration of the narrator's consciousness and the two players or voices he has imagined. The opening stage is once again present, but now only the man at the desk is there and we are told who he is: death.

The closing refrain concludes the cycle by beginning it again: the neutral passage of time, a sense of awakening, and from that awakening the admission or discovery of desire.

My digression of tying the voices to the narrator and his vision of the black and white checks may be used now as an effective tool. The splitting of consciousness or, phrased in a different way, the process of listening to the voices within one's self, is not only a technical point but allows consideration of the themes of human consciousness and human existence in relation to time.

The narrator is listening to the voices of the past within himself. This means that just as time is a stonelike structure rippling eternally outward and enclosing layers of existence within it, so man too contains time within himself. The voices of the past argue inside of him. The substance of their argument concerns the meaning and quality of life. What is the relationship, if any, among things? Why is life chaotic and apparently homeless and futile? Is there any chance of escape by the flight of the bird, or by exchanging one location or one ideal for another?

The depth of these questions is strengthened by the technical quality of the device of the multiple self. As used in this poem, it is not unlike a Greek play with the narrator functioning as the probing and repeating Greek chorus. This repetition, association, and contrast may be studied to gain further insight into the poem. Ekelöf has stated some theories about poetry which are useful in looking at the structure of "Voices."

Poetry to me is mysticism and music. Mysticism to me is not to nail together abstruse themes; it is the deep experience of life itself, the apprehension of the eternally elusive, shifting, returning in everything which is related to picture, tone, thought, feeling, and life.

"Voices" seems to correspond to this theory of a shifting and elusive poetry. The two voices are preoccupied in some metaphorical or allegorical way with the continually changing yet related images of life. Ekelöf's mention of music provides a basis for further analysis.

Thus poetry is for me an art form which has much to do with music because it occurs both for the poet and the reader, with words as notes, with the relations of word contents, with the nuances one word gives the next and the following throws back on the previous, like tone color, or harmony…. It is a form which among other things works with repetitions, motive repetitions, and development, allusion to what has been or will come, parallelisms, likenesses, all of those devices in the power of which man seeks to "enjoy" existence…

There is an underlying theme in ["Voices"] of the need or the wish to provide one's own light. "The harsh stare" of external lamps may show us reality, but they provide no internal illumination. One cannot renounce life, but if one wishes to create, the dream must be preserved, even at the expense of external life. "A white loneliness against a black loneliness" applies to the dilemma of a poet of dreams. Ekelöf is such a poet and he fought the dilemma throughout much of his life."…