Tarjei Vesaas’s Snow and Spruce Forest

Talk about what home is —
snow and spruce forest
is home.

From the very start
it is ours.
Before anyone has told us
that it is snow and spruce forest,
it has its place in us —
and then it is there
the whole, whole time.

“Snø og granskog” appeared in Tarjei Vesaas’s first poetry collection, Kjeldene, which can be translated into English as From the Sources, connecting the idea of a physical underground water source to the idea of an even deeper, metaphysical source, such as life, creativity, or spirituality.

The poem is a good example of three common features in Vesaas’s poetry: a spiritual searching, a natural landscape that at times is rendered unnatural or mystical, and phrasing that produces sounds that exemplify the poetic experience being described.

The spiritual searching in this case is for the elusive idea of home, which in the predominately rural Nordic region always involves a natural environment in addition to, or in communion with, a building or familial bonds. The poem begins, “Talk about what home is— / snow and spruce forest / is home.” The speaker uses the first-person plural we throughout, suggesting not only a kinship between humans and nature but also among humans who share this home.

The boundaries of this home are not clearly delineated, however; the snow and the forest are “wherever we are,” so much a part of us that they are “mixed into our own breath.” In the line following “breath,” Vesaas uses the aural properties of his native Norwegian to produce the sound of human breath huffing in the cold air: Heile heile tida (The whole, whole time). In reading the poem aloud, then, the reader becomes one of the “we” who are present in the snow and spruce forest, one of the “we” who are “coming home” (Greenwald xvi).

The strangeness of this natural setting is precisely the speaker’s claim that it is the forest and the snow, not a cabin into which we retreat to escape them, that are home. In the process, Vesaas suggests that we carry our idea of “home” in our hearts and minds rather than simply occupy it in body, although it is our bodily experience of this “home” that forges the link: “—and feeling so it flares in you / what it is to be where you belong.”

In his classic architectural work Nightlands: Nordic Building, Christian Norberg-Schulz describes the Norwegian valleys of Telemark, where Vesaas lived most of his life: “Here, people are at home, and animals are safe. Here, place is an understood world, even in threatening weather” (Norberg-Schulz 32).

While Vesaas’s poem draws from a particularly rural Nordic landscape to affirm this affiliation, the powerful simplicity of its language and the inclusiveness of its we-speaker seduces all who are engaged in our all-too-modern quest to recognize “home” in our lived-in natural environments.

Bibliography

Norberg-Schulz, Christian. Nightlands: Nordic Building. Translated by Thomas McQuillan. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1996.

Vesaas, Tarjei. Through Naked Branches: Selected Poems of Tarjei Vesaas. Edited and translated by Roger Greenwald. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000.

Categories: Literature, World Literature

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