I Want To Meet …
Armed, upright and shielded in armour
I went forth –
but from fear was the coat of mail cast
and from shame.
I want to throw down my weapons,
sword and shield.
All the stark hostility
was my coldness.
I have seen the dry seeds
finally grow.
I have seen the light green
unfurl.
Mighty is the tenderness of life
stronger than iron,
driven out of the heart of the Earth
defenceless.
Spring dawns in winter regions,
where I froze.
I want to meet the forces of life
weaponless.
This poem (“Jag vill möta . . .”) appeared in Swedish poet Karin Boye’s third collection, Härdarna (The Hearths, 1927), and represents her earlier, conventional, and more popular poetry, before a radical formal shift occurred eight years later. It employs regular meter, perfect rhyme, and a five-quatrain stanzaic structure.
Yet the poem’s formal simplicity belies a lofty and complex philosophical agenda that pervades all of her poetry. Boye believed lyrical poetry to be a more direct, intimate, and transformative communicative art than prose, though she also was an award-winning writer of novels, short fiction, and polemical essays.
In her critical essay Daydreaming as a Philosophy of Life (1931), first published in the avant-garde cultural journal Spektrum, Boye argues that poetry is the most brutally honest of the written arts, holding poet and reader accountable to their ideals as well as to imminent material and cultural conditions.
Boye believed poetry could reconnect individuals to a central source of creative power, thereby reconnecting them spiritually to one another, in the way that a prism gathers and redistributes light (thus her choice of the journal’s title, Spektrum). In the essay Boye writes:
“So concentrated becomes our interest in that focal point—people’s lives—that we have nothing left for isolated worlds of beauty, culture for culture’s sake. So forceful [is our interest] that it does not stop at the finished piece of art but bores down to the fragment of life that the artist lays bare. It is there we seek guidance for our common journey.”
This ideal is embodied in the poem I Want to Meet . . ., which contrasts an artificial, fearful, and chilling power—one that employs weapons and armor—with a natural, liberated, and warming power present at life’s creative source:
“More powerful than iron / is life in nascence, / driven out of the earth’s heart / without defense.”
Tellingly, the speaker concludes not by casting off the trappings of false power, but by expressing a strong desire to do so:
“Spring dawns in winter’s regions, / where I froze. / I want to meet life’s powers / weaponless.”
The power of this poem, then, lies in its lyrical expression, which seeks to implant a common desire to disarm and reconnect. The contrast between artificial and constructed power, on the one hand, and natural and raw reproductive power, on the other, illustrates a cornerstone of Boye’s philosophy of language.
In another critical essay, Language Beyond Logic (“Språket bortom logiken,” 1933), Boye argues that poetry empowers its practitioners to reach beyond the artificial limitations of cognitive language to a central source of creative expression. For Boye this applies to readers and reciters of poetry as well as to its writers; these acts of communication are interdependent.
Given that I Want to Meet . . . imparts a powerful, immediate, and suprarational effect on audiences still today, it would seem Boye’s faith in the communicative power of lyrical poetry is well placed.
Bibliography
Boye, Karin. “Dagdrömmeriet som livsåskådning” (Daydreaming as a Philosophy of Life) and “Språket bortom logiken” (Language Beyond Logic). In Det hungriga ögat (The Hungry Eye): Journalistik 1930–36 Recensioner och essäer (Journalism 1930–36 Reviews and Essays), edited by Gunnar Ståhl. Stockholm: Legus, 1992.
Categories: Literature, Swedish Literature, World Literature
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