This poem, Bön till solen, appeared in Karin Boye’s fourth and final collection of poetry, För trädets skull (For the Tree’s Sake, 1935). (A fifth collection, De sjudödssynderna [The Seven Deadly Sins], was published posthumously in 1941.)
This poem is representative of Boye’s high modernist work, departing dramatically from her earlier poetry in both its formal experimentation and its explicit conflation of religious incantations and sexual imagery. Tropes of pain as repressed pleasure and hermaphroditic sex abound in this poem, as do Christian liturgical invocations (Göransson and Mesterton 1990).
Boye appropriates these stock religious phrases, which parishioners recite in unison to invoke the divine during a worship service, summoning a “merciless” and violent god. The Gloria Patri (expressed in English as “Glory to God”), which is used to summon the spirit of God, becomes in Boye’s poem “Merciless One with eyes that have never seen the darkness!” and “Liberator who with golden hammers breaks forth frozen waters!”
The speaker thus desires a violent and brutal god rather than the gracious and beneficent divinity of Christian tradition. The other invocation is the Kyrie Eleison (expressed in English as “Lord, have mercy”), which Boye renders simply as “Save me” in the poem’s third line (and repeats as the poem progresses). Boye preserves the lyrical convention of the “I—You” address to forge a lover’s intimacy between the speaker and her god.
Yet the collective practice of the liturgical tradition, in which parishioners recite the invocations in first person but do it in unison, posits the poem’s speaker as both individual and collective. This desire for unity is also manifest in Boye’s sexual imagery, which is androgynous. “Straight as thin lines the flowers’ stalks are sucked into the heights” is a phallic image, while “their perianths want to tremble closer to you” is a yonic one.
The speaker experiences this intensely painful sexual longing vicariously, through the primal intercourse between the flowers and trees rooted in the earth and the distant yet imminent Sun whose light is their life source. In the final line of the second stanza, the fusion between the human and her divine life force is complete: “Yours are stalk and stem. Yours is my backbone.”
This fused being, the united humanity, is what the speaker calls on her god to save: “Save it. / Not my life. Not my skin. / Gods do not rule over surface things.” The speaker does not desire individual salvation, which is meaningless, but a preservation of the unity she experienced at the moment of climax—a sense of spiritual community with all living things.
By the conclusion the speaker’s initial cry to her “merciless god” becomes a more subdued and desperate plea: “Save, save, seeing god, what you gave.” Boye shows us here that the god who “sees”—connoting here not so much physical sight as insight—is the god who creates (gives) those rare and fleeting moments of ecstasy, when the ego barriers that divide humans and nations crash down and forge a perfect unity of individuals.
Bibliography
Göransson, Sverker, and Erik Mesterton. “Karin Boyes modernism: en läsning av ‘Bön till solen’” (Karin Boye’s Modernism: A Reading of ‘Prayer to the Sun’). In Den orörliga lågan: Analyser av femton 1900-talsdikter (The Unquenchable Fire: Close Readings of 15 20th-Century Poems), edited by Sverker Göransson and Erik Mesterton, 27–31. 1990. Reprint, Göteborg, Sweden: Daidalos, 1998.
Lindqvist, Ursula. “The Politics of Form: Imagination and Ideology in 1930s Transnational Exhibitions and Socially Engaged Poetry.” Ph.D. diss., University of Oregon, 2005.
Categories: Literature, Swedish Literature, World Literature
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