Sweden's Laureate: Selected Poems of Verner von Heidenstam/Childhood Friends

by Carl Gustaf Verner von Heidenstam

CHILDHOOD FRIENDS.

One evening the Hall folk during a storm
Took a pack of old pictures as cards and played
Round a plate on which toffy and apples were laid.
The stoves with shut damper were glowing warm,
In eddying flakes the snow was flurried
Against the panes, that were coated with frost,
No jingle told that friends or the post
Through the deepening drifts of the roadway hurried.
Three ancient sisters were heirs of the place,
Who now, as in their grandmother's days,
Shuffled the pack in the lamplight's glow
And dealt out the people they used to know.
With every picture they got for their hands
They would softly twitch at their shawls a while,
Would speak of old times and simper and smile,
And shake their bonnets with ribbon bands.
A Lieutenant von Platen they used as a jack,
A homely Miss Dubb was "old maid" of the pack.

The cards of the eldest would slip unduly.
She heard her sisters conversing coolly
Of bygone days—and night came on,
But she sat with them silent, as if alone.
The poodle slunk with an anxious whine
From her lap, then sniffed and with fixèd stare
Looked up at the vacant easy-chair,
Which, they say, with a beast is a certain sign
It sees a dead man in his wonted place,
Where by night as by day is but empty space.

She was sunk in thought.—With a far-off gaze,
As one who hears an old song to a zither,
She recalled a friend of her childhood days,
Who had left her. They played as two larks that twitter.
She was older a year but as wild as he.
They leapt into brooks amid splashing water,
And hand in hand they would wander free
On the darkening heath. She saw that he thought her
Too old, wishing: "Were you but small and were you
Afraid when we hark to the fir-trees sighing,
So that I over gate and stile must bear you
And through the bushes where snakes are lying!
You were born ten summers too soon for me."—
So he thought as he walked by her moodily.
Then quickly as hands of masons, plying.
The vaults and spires of a palace might rear.
They built up their lives with day and year.
When he had reached spring, her summer was near.
She sprinkled beans in the porridge-vessel
And pounded cinnamon with her pestle
And set it out on the family board,
While he thought: "How soon the rose-tree is laden
With bloom! You should still be a little maiden
Who'd hark on my knee to my every word
Of the wide, strange world my vision had stored
From tales that in painter's ink were set."—
Then down on their hearts there snowed regret,
For she understood and suffered no less.
They went to the lake and in deep distress
Sat down with hand to forehead and wept;
But they changed the rings from their fingers then,
For well did they know that never again
Could they give to another the rings they kept.

He went on his way, his spurs he earned
In distant countries where battle burned.
When, blackened with smoke, his horse in a lather,
He led on his men, he was gay and erect.
But when in the noisy night they would gather
Around the camp-fire, forest-decked,
Each one by a girl with a flask at his lips,
Though their coats were bloody and shot into strips;
In silent gloom apart from the crew
He sat, until, as if roused anew
By a bell, he recklessly sprang from the grass;
Then, wilder than all, to his mouth he drew
Each Circe or cluster of grapes he would pass.
The minutes in Time's great hour-glass
More quickly slipped. His cheek was aflame,
More young with every year he became,
A rebel, who at seventy still
Might wait the first wound of his foeman's skill
Which furrows the outer bastion's frame.
He moved in a tumult of glad alarm,
But his heart was asleep on his one love's arm.
One night, when the rain was pouring down,
All scratched and heated, he clambered out
Of a countess's window, and gazed about
And thought as he looked at the town:

"When a daughter lies to her mother, we say
Love's vaunted sun approaches the prime.
When she lies to him she has sworn to obey,
Her heart feels love for the second time.
Like a sneaking thief with skeleton keys
Love breaks through all vows and promises.
There is not in love one man of honor.
Would you see the worst scoundrels that ever drank
At breast, then behold them rank on rank,
When the whispering couples beneath Love's banner
Go by, each pair with fetters that clank,
As in long parade through the streets they walk
With insult and lie and slanderous talk;
For merely to watch how lovers gloat
Enkindles in others the mean and the low.
The sage, whether clad in toga or coat,
Closes his window and laughs at the show.
Next to the waiter and the woman's physician
The lover's the man that merits derision.
Wise married man, let your blood be chill,
And leave him to play his vaudeville,
For the horn he stealthily gives you to wear
Is less droll than the ass's ears be must bear
Himself when he sips enchanted of
The cup where you sated your youth's glad ire.
Where in all the befuddling joust of love
Are the noble raptures men sing to the lyre?
These lovers will start if you rap on the door
Like a school of fishes you scare with an oar.
Had love the worth of two rhymes in it,
Don Juan, who laughs as he leans on his blade,
Would not be the one man who boldly flayed
The avenger's back with his scourging wit.
Is thirst a fine thing because throats will thirst?
When the amorous poets, of liars the first,
Have set at the window the doll they admire,
With its rattle they lure the next passer-by,
For never doll danced before lover's eye
But it wakened a thrill of selfish desire.
Nay, to what likeness does love aspire?
It is but a little scampering rat,
That jumps in your way as you're going to bed,
And flies behind plank and door at your tread,
And because it slinks off in such mortal dread
'Tis a mark for the stone of each beggar brat.
Think not that Love hides a dream that is fraught
With cradles or any such worthy thought;
He's a tippler who in his secret lair
Pulls his cap down and whispers: "There's steps on the stair—
Don't pause but toss off the glass without heed."
The animal-lover, who cuts the cork
And hook from the fishing-rod, who will feed
His sweetheart's tiny linnet with seed,
Will none the less look askance at the stork.
When love goes to sleep, our souls first move
To strains of deep feeling that will not pass.
Is a mother not more than a toying lass?
But the child she holds is the corpse of love.
On the mount of the gods, where in vain their liege is
Opposing to time his broken ægis,
With gray-haired Bacchus near by, we see
In never-changing stupidity
Fat Venus, who sits like a country girl
As she fastens a ribbon around a curl.
I furthermore count as a grievous fault
That blondest of hair which she thus attires.
She never glows, she only perspires;
For blondes are as bread that is baked without salt,
And their table-talk is inept and stale.
Then black hair, too, conceals without fail
A faithless lust for daggers and death;
And no dream could portray under bridal wreath
The hair that God gave the horse for his tail.
But soft chestnut-brown, where the sun-beams dapple.
Whose tints with the tones of Correggio strive,
To such, O Iduna, I give thine apple,
That's the hair to bewitch any man alive.
In brief, on dazzling shoulders hangs
The blondest hair ever curled in bangs,
Or twined with gold and sent for a drive.
She pats on the cheek the first groom she meets
And goes with his smell to the emperor's sheets.
Don't try her with thoughts, for she'll puff them away;
Take your gloves off and smack her buttocks in play,
Then wink and step on her toes a bit,
That's the wooing that suits Lady Venus's wit.
But if evil thoughts in her mind shall flow,
She'll poison the dart on Cupid's bow.
It is only to children, who sportively bear
Her apples and doves while they dream of her blisses,
That the smirking deceiver appears as fair
With thirst-cooling clusters of baneful kisses.
Yet there's no stout oak of kingliest frame
But the whistling hail will shatter its crest;
The hurt man will dig his nails in his breast,
And curse, as I do, her might and her name.
He alone on earth wins a great career
Who, lost in thought, has passed by the dame.
How pallid her failing lamp will appear,
When the love your own effort has brought to birth
Flings arms of flame around heaven and earth!"

So he spoke, while with dripping hat
Over swimming highway and field he strode.
At length on the grass in his tent he sat.
Determined to fly by whatever road
His horse should choose, on that very night.
But the deepest wood and the swiftest river
Afford not oblivion's refuge ever
For the self-doomed man who has taken to flight.
When he jumped down one evening with clattering sword
To the doorstep of home from the robes of his sledge,
He saw by the lantern's light that poured
On her as she stood by the privet hedge
Amid full-grown sisters, that on her face
The claws of time had been digging their trace.

He looked and he looked, as sad and still
As is a cloudless October morn,
When you note how on floor and window-sill
The lilac-tree shadow is faint and forlorn,
A thin net of cords and knots, though bright
The sun on the pane is shedding his light.
He clasped her as hard as in time of wreck
Two drunkards in terror embrace on the deck,
For she was still the one love of his heart.
As, when children, they turned with a frightened start
On the bridge by the cliff and listened long
To the water's subterranean surge.
They heard now afar the threatening song
Of coming fate's inescapable urge.

The holy wedding-day soon approached,
When spiggots were hammered and casks were broached.
The hop-wine into the pitchers had raced,
The birches along the corridor placed
Like a guard of honor were stiffly standing.
Fat fowls under the axe had bled.
Each floor was leaf-strewn, and rose-leaves were spread
By the sisters from sieves on each stair and landing.
For the drive to church the waggon was wound
With veils that had ever been saved by all
The maidens whose heads had been myrtle-crowned
This fifty years past up at the Hall.
But alone in her room through all the worry
She left her sisters to toil and hurry.
Each hour's time held a life's distress.
On her lap lay her sable wedding-dress,
For a garment of white beseems but the young.
At the heaven of fate with clouds overhung
She stared, while a storm in her bosom held sway;
She saw there but gloom that never was lighted.
In her grief she sat, like an autumn day
Where flowers are left, but all of them blighted.
Yet when eager across the threshold he stepped,
She quietly took his hands in her own
And told him of all that, silent, alone.
Through years of pain she had secretly wept.
Then a chilly glint fell on everything,
And across the black dress that lay on her knee
She tremblingly gave him back the ring,
While she spoke so low that near by on a tree
A sparrow tranquilly plumed her wing:

"My love is my life, my all upon earth,
And yours but the warmth of the home-cheering hearth,
Where you'll shiver soon at the weaning blaze.
I should have stayed on in my springtime days.
We must not be bound by riveted links
Till each hates the other, and moans and shrinks.
I beg you forget me. I close my breast
And only long for the sleep of the grave.
But I know that my spirit is still possessed
Of a chain that holds you at my behest
With the memory-links that our springtime gave,
Which are set with jewels of deeper glow
Than love with its gleam as from hell below.
Whenever you seek to give to another
The ring that now from my hand is warm,
You will stand there pale, your eyes you will cover,
Then stunned and waking you'll check your arm.
Between two eternities we have met—
And we part—That you're gone I may think sincerely;
But it's only an error, illusion merely.
The brooding man holds his compasses yet
On the circle in which his thoughts are bound
And like wolves go anxiously round and round;
Great men of the day, a contented set,
In street-corner conference go and come;
New friends at his heart are knocking there
And guests tramp up the snow-covered stair
To be welcomed by him on the porch of his home—
They are all but as painted figures that roam
Over ceiling and wall through a great hall's space,
Where we two as ever stand face to face.
My fate with your fate is interwrought,
And thousands must fight the fight we have fought,
Where love attains more than love can give.
The one whom you love as long as you live,
The one who has gained your every thought,
Is old and faded; you never can
Give her the love that love seeks to own.
You shall wander about as a homeless man,
Shall reap but thistles where flowers you've sown.
But ever your longing heart shall grieve
In its wish to love her and her alone,
As birds might love when their glad wings cleave
The air all aglow with the summer's fire,
And your heart shall be wasted with vain desire."

 It was thus that she spoke the day he went,
And she fell in a faint as his wheels rolled away.
Now rising, above the side-board she leant
Where the Christmas tarts and cookies lay.

That evening she dealt them every one
To the manor servants, who when it was done
Were filled with surprise by the kitchen board
At the prodigal food and candle-light.
Her sisters alone caught the whispered word:
"My dearest memory makes its flight
Through the storm to guest in our house to-night,
It has come over dusky waters and lands
And has laid on my hair two blessing hands."

 The Hall soon slept, the panes no more shone,
But, deep in a problem that baffles all skill,
Awake in the arm-chair, hushed and still,
A little parched woman was sitting alone.