"Det första vårregnet"

Som ett nät av svarta spindelvävar
hänga trädens våta grenar.
I den tysta februarinatten
sjunger sakta, klingar, svävar
fram ur däldens snår och stenar
suset av en källas vatten.

I den tysta februarinatten
gråter himlen stilla.
                                      -Syner, 1901

"The First Spring Rain"

Black, like webs from spinning spiders playing
branches, moisture-heavy, bend
In the silent February night
singing slowly, ringing, swaying
out of rock-strewn, brushy glen
sounds of wellspring, watery delight.

In the silent February night
  cry the heavens softly.
                                 -Visions, 1901

For the average Swede, Ekelund's poetry can occasionally take on an exotic quality, which comes about quite simply because his Scanian landscape truly is a foreign landscape. Our everyday experiences mean more to our relationship with a poem than we would normally imagine.

I remember how, while teaching Tomas Tranströmer to students at the University of Texas, I came to the wellknown line that reads: "like a sun-warm stone in my hand" ("som en solvarm sten i handen").

"That can't be," one of the students said immediately. "If somebody were to hold a 'sun-warm stone' in his hand, he'd get blisters. And he'd toss that stone away as fast as he possibly could."

Undoubtedly, this is how stones and men behave in the parched regions around Texas' Colorado River. Of course, that did not prevent the student from understanding what Tranströmer meant. I think the poem even became more interesting to him when he understood that this brief picture contained a wholly alien climatic experience.

For a reader from central or northern Sweden, February is a period of deep snow and dryness; arctic-clear days, when bullfinches and silktails come out from the deep woods in search of food; ice-cold nights, when contraction brought on by the chill causes a moaning and groaning in wooden houses, and shoes crunch on unplowed roads.

For Ekelund, "the silent February night" is the time when the landscape begins to shed silent tears. I think that a northern Swedish reader would more readily associate this experience with the beginning of April.

Differences which do not mean anything and, yet, most profoundly do mean something. They compel us to make an extra effort, and in this small exertion there is always a gain, a small electrical charge. I know of no more sterile an idea than that poetry should sneak up as close to its reader as possible, make itself as accessible as possible to him. The little difference in electric potential itself—the one that makes it possible for the spark to leap between anode and cathode—will, of course, be lost in that way.

Ekelund's February night, then, is not our February night. It belongs to central Europe; spring nights in Berlin parks are like this: he must have seen such branches, felt that kind of wetness, countless times during his lengthy exile.

I do not think there is any Swedish poet who manifests such firmly rooted opposition, antipathy, obstinate refusal, heightened loathing toward lightly flowing, melodic poetry as does Vilhelm Ekelund. All his contempt for the stale Establishment poetry which dominated the Swedish scene in his youth is present, concealed, in his rhythms.

Nowadays, when free verse is frequently but an expression of the fact that the poet has never learned, or even become acquainted with, any other poetic technique, such verse, in the happiest cases, is created by coincidence.

Among now-living Swedish poets there are precious few who actually take pains to write free verse which is, at the same time, rhythmically interesting. In Göran Sonnevi one can recognize such an endeavor, but he is an exception. On the whole, one must go to the great Finland-Swedish poets, to a Diktonius or a Björling, to find anything similar to this.

"The First Spring Rain" begins quite monotonously with two long series of trochees, almost like a ticking clock; even better, like drops—yes, of course, drops falling from branches:

dá-dit-dá-dit-dá-dit-dá-dit-dá-dit
  dá-dit-dá-dit-dá-dit-dá-dit

Note that there is one trochee less in the second line. Ekelund is poet enough to know what Petrarch and Dante also knew; regularity does not necessarily preclude irregularity. It is precisely in the monotony that one can prepare the real surprises. From this uniform, discreetly rhymed trochaic verse the words February night free themselves like great beings, slowly and silently advancing creatures.

What occurs in the next line is very typical of Ekelund's entire poetic technique:

singing slowly, ringing, swaying

One adjective is seldom enough, and here one verb is not enough. Ekelund takes his time, he specifies exactly, through a series of words, the sensation he wishes to encircle. Because of this, it would be easy, even if we did not know when or by whom it was written, to see that this is a poem written on the threshold of Swedish poetic modernism.

From a classical point of view—that is to say, proceeding from the poetics which have their roots in the French classics—in Boileau's poetic theory there is always one word which is the correct one, and the trick consists in finding that word. Poetry becomes a kind of snapshooting at reality, with the help of words.

In order for such a poetic technique to appear practicable and reasonable and effective, one must be convinced, naturally, that language really coincides with reality, and it is precisely upon this condition that French classicism builds.

The dissolution, the dejection, begins with romanticism and reaches its culmination during the second half of the nineteenth century, when a succession of philosophers—such as Nietzsche, Fritz Mauthner, and Alexander Bryan Johnson—state plainly that language is not simply approximative: it has nothing at all to do with reality.

This linguistic pessimism penetrates deep into literature during the second half of the nineteenth century. We can already see it in Henrik Ibsen's The Wild Duck (1884), with its conviction that human beings cannot possibly live without their illusions, without the "life lie."

And it forms one of the deepest roots for what is usually termed literary modernism. What language can best do with reality is not to reproduce it but, rather, to encircle it through circuitous operations.

This is exactly what is occurring when Ekelund writes:

singing slowly, ringing, swaying

The line produces an enormously effective intensification, but it also evokes an uncertainty, and nature becomes spiritual. It is impossible to differentiate between the state of one's soul and the landscape in "The First Spring Rain," and this is the second characteristic of the poem that obviously connects it with poetic modernism. It is even possible that at bottom it is exactly the same thing as saying that the essential element seems to lie between the words rather than in them, but to explain why would take us too far.

The poem is a story about a landscape, but it is at once and in the same context a story about a human being who, after disappointments, impoverishment, and bitterness, suddenly discovers that there are new, life-giving forces in the very midst of the impoverishment and the nakedness. There is a wellspring in the leafless February forest. The rain is not merely rain, it is a crying, exactly as the rain cries in the great French symbolists and, above all, in Paul Verlaine. In all stillness, a change is being readied, the soul is awakening from a period of bitterness, and this must of necessity change the landscape in its entirety. Image and eye coincide. We are what we see, and thus we are changed.

"The First Spring Rain" fits into a great European tradition which, having become a reality, will not permit itself to be forgotten.