Instinct

My body is a mystery.
As long as the fragile lives
you shall feel its power.
I shall save the world.
Therefore Eros’ blood runs in my lips
and Eros’ gold in my tired locks.
I need only to open my eyes.
tired and depressed: the Earth is mine.

When I lie tired on the bed
I know: the fate of the world is in this tired hand.
It is power that tremble in my shoe,
it is power that move in the fold of my dress,
it is power that knows no abyss which stands before you.

This poem first appeared in Södergran’s fourth volume, Framtidens skugga (The Shadow of the Future), the last collection of her poems published before her death. It expresses a culminating spiritual experience.

Starting with her second volume and continuing into this one, Södergran moves away from the symbolist influences that characterize her earlier work and engages more fully with German expressionism and Russian futurism. She also deepens her poetic engagement with Nietzschean philosophy, recuperating the figure of the modern individual from an outlook of despair over a senseless world to a position of hope in the individual’s inner creative power.

External chaos is not what defines and delimits a person’s creative potential, Södergran determined; inner self-doubts do. A person’s primal instinct, located in the body and connected to the Earth’s origins, is where the power to overcome these limitations lies (Hackman 157).

“I let my instincts build while my intellect watches,” Södergran writes in an introductory remark to her second collection. “My self-confidence comes from the fact that I have discovered my dimensions. It does not behoove me to make myself smaller than I am” (Love & Solitude xi).

This strong confidence drives Södergran’s poem Instinct, a 13-line, unrhymed, lyrical poem that features a speaker who declares her power to save the world even as the poet herself lies dying of tuberculosis. As in “The Day Cools…,” the female body dominates the poem’s imagery. Here, however, it is in physical decay: “When I lie exhausted on my bed / I know: in this weakened hand lies the fate of the earth.”

The speaker’s hand is a metaphor for her ability to write poetry, which Södergran believed was the antidote to modern humanity’s spiritual desolation. The speaker’s physical weakness, ironically, increases her creative power; she is able to reconnect with her primal instinct through the bodily experience of acute and prolonged pain.

“My body is a mystery,” the poem begins. “As long as this brittle thing is alive / you will feel its power.” While the poem’s English translation makes it appear to retain the classic lyrical “I–You” form of address, in the language of the Swedish original, the pronouns are not personal but universal. The poem’s “I” represents all individuals who use their intellect to serve their creative instincts, and in the Swedish new critical tradition the term for a poem’s speaker is actually “the poem’s I” (diktens jag).

The “I,” then, is the figure of the poet. The poem’s “you,” however, is plural, a detail often lost in translation. (English, for example, uses the same pronoun for both the second-person singular and the second-person plural, while in Swedish and many other languages there are two distinct sets of pronouns.) Thus the poem’s “you” whom the speaker will save are the human masses who lack the poet’s creative power.

As in most of Södergran’s work, the speaker is female, reflecting Södergran’s consistent ideological and figurative conflation of the reproductive capacity of the female sex and the creative power of the female poet. The poem concludes: “It is the power that trembles in my shoe, / it is the power that moves in the folds of my dress, / and it is the power, fearing no abyss, that stands before you.”

Thus while the speaker’s body lies weakly on the bed, her instincts stand erect and fearless, creating a powerful poem.

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Bibliography

Hackman, Boel. Jag kan sjunga hur jag vill. Tankevärld och konstsyn i Edith Södergran’s diktning. Stockholm: Söderströms, 2000.
Södergran, Edith. Love & Solitude: Selected Poems 1916–1923. Translated by Stina Katchadourian. Seattle: Fjord Press, 1992.