Jens Bjørneboe is perhaps not known chiefly as a lyric poet. The novelist, the dramatist and the sociocritical essayist Bjørneboe have in recent years aroused greater attention. But it was as a poet he made his debut—with the collection Poems in 1951. Favorable discussion met the newcomer from most reviewers. To be sure, the benevolence was often joined with a certain wonderment. It was not daily fare to find a new poet who so emphatically stood with both feet planted in the distant past, in the world of Bible stories, legends and myths.

The artistic program Bjørneboe presented likewise aroused notice. In a debut interview in the fall of 1951 we read: "'For me poetry is a science,' says Bjørneboe. 'A stringent method of cognition which operates with sounds and images.'" (1) In another interview he says: "For me anthroposophy is the poetic view of life. Poesy is a method of cognition which consists in listening oneself into what is behind things, into the true reality, which is of a spiritual nature." (2) This must be called a somewhat unusual starting point for a new poet in the year 1951. Back then he was also for a number of years connected with the Rudolf Steiner School in Oslo as a teacher. The educator, the anthroposophist and the poet Bjørneboe turn out to be closely interconnected in all the poetry collections from the 1950s.

The collection Poems achieved three printings, with a combined run of 2200 copies. The next collection, Ariadne, also came out in unusually large run: 1650 copies. This was in the fifties, mind, a good many years before the state started buying belles-lettres in quantity [for libraries] in 1965. Bjørneboe's last real volume of poems, The Big City, followed in 1958. Then, however, it was the novelist, the social gadfly who had books like Jonas and Under a Harsher Sky on his conscience, who aroused the greatest interest —and often outrage. Erling Christie expresses concern for the poet Bjørneboe's development: "Was there any possibility of his finding his way back to poetry, or was he lost forever in the labyrinth of social indignation?" (3)

Yes, he found his way back. Like a phoenix the lyricist Bjørneboe rises again in the middle of the 1960s. The plays Many Happy Returns (1965) and The Bird-Lovers (1966) are leavened with songs, so that the works approach what he himself has described as "musical comedy". In the two sociocritical musicals the poetic elements serve to underscore the plays' social message. Bertolt Brecht appears to have found a pupil both apt and gifted in Jens Bjørneboe—in respect first to dramaturgy, and—in a somewhat more undigested form—to ideology as well.

It is not only the content which augurs a new orientation for Bjørneboe, but also the form. In his debut collection more than half of the poems were sonnets. The meter and the end rhyme usually came with a precision worthy of a Swiss watch. "Several of the poems in the collection I must have revised thirty times," he says about the volume Poems. (4) Moreover, the formal conservatism fit well with the content's tone of high culture. The song lyrics from the mid-sixties, on the other hand, are more closely related to the simple folksong, the penny press's melodramatic excess and pedestrian moralizing, the thriller's macabre humor. And the language has now become more prosaic, the form simpler.

At the premiere of Many Happy Returns Jens Bjørneboe discusses the poet of the same name: "...after all, I'm basically a poet." (5) Obviously we should guard against being taken in by writers' confessions. In any case it's amazing how little space poetry, his "real" form of expression, fills in the period between 1966, when he finished The Bird Lovers, and his death in 1976. Bjørneboe himself offers an explanation for this in a 1971 newspaper interview:

Q.    But on a completely different subject, Bjørneboe, why don't you write poetry any longer, you who were so good in your time?

A.    No, well, there isn't any money in it. Besides I guess I'm getting old. The thing with writing poems, it demands a very definite inner state, different from writing plays and novels. I don't have it any more, I'm sorry. But perhaps it will come again; God knows. (6)

During these years Bjørneboe was constantly engaged in one battle or another. The inner concentration and distillation needed to satisfy the fifties' program of poetry as "science" and "a stringent method of cognition" was hardly possible. Perhaps the pugnacious and polemically inclined writer found the novel and the play better suited as means of expression. In 1968 Bjørneboe nonetheless came out with a selection of poems—Ashes, Wind, and Earth. The texts were taken from the fifties' three poetry collections as well as from the sixties' two satiric musicals. In addition he presented a number of poems not previously published in book form. The last shot at the genre is the publication of Bjørneboe's Collected Poems in 1977, edited by André Bjerke.

Now over to the poems themselves, their subject matter and perhaps also the ideology they express. We begin where Bjørneboe began, with the 1950s. Bjørneboe shares the modernists' view of the world around him as a world in disarray. But he does not share their need for strange inventions of a formal sort. The modernists felt it as unsatisfactory, almost an obscenity, to render the time's dread and disquiet in a harmonic, rhythmic formal language. Even if Bjørneboe shared the modernists' skepticism of the capitalist techno-culture, he never stands completely helpless with no fixed principle of existence. In the European cultural heritage of the past—Christianity, Platonism, the myths and legends of antiquity—he found allies in his attack on the vulgarized mass culture of 20th-century Europe.

The poem "The Eternal Pains" from the debut collection is in a family with romanticism's idea of a golden age. If you just go far enough back in time, human beings appear greater, wiser and more beautiful, the earth purer and the art richer. The classical ideals stand as normative for all later ages, because they belong to a period of human history when the acquaintance with the laws of existence was greater than it is today. A couple of stanzas show what value Bjørneboe ascribes to the potter's craft in bygone times.

Occasionally you even find a real pain
which, turned by hand,
descends from Attic tribes and others
from kings,
rare, incredible works of a strange,
original spirit.

(. . .)
Oh! But the best of all are these
which even as splinters
reach back—Chaldean, Indic,
Cretan shards—
pains from the city of Ur!
Indestructible as flint!

Bjørneboe's interest in cultures of the past was not construed by most critics as an expression of escapism. Rather the orientation toward primitive cultural sources was seen as a "welcome counterweight to provinciality and self-absorption." (7) A quick glance at his poem titles in the fifties shows that Roman history, religion and art, both in Antiquity and the Renaissance, as well as the Italian landscape, are consistently among his most important themes.

Just as Italy and Antiquity were an object of longing for earlier generations of poets, so they likewise became for Bjørneboe. The romantic-idealistic longing back to what Hegel called "the heroic age" describes Bjørneboe's longing as well. The farther back we go in time, the greater the dimensions ascribed to humanity and its works. In "Fiesole" (1951) Romans' culture is itelf seen as a time of decline, compared with that of their mystical predecessors, the Etruscans. The Romans' "republican hands" almost profane the Etruscans' culture—a culture which must clearly be close to the gods.

This is our smile to Rome:
The gold from our hands
is transmuted into lead in yours.
The fire from our altars
drowns your sacrifice in ashes.

The tragic fall sometime in humanity's childhood is not totally irremediable. Even if human beings are in the main deaf to the voice of the gods, there is nonetheless hope for change. The seer on Patmos wrote in his time of a new heaven and a new earth; so does Bjørneboe. In the memorial poem about Hans Jæger, Before the Solstice (1951) we find mention of a coming spring after the terrible winter is over. An explanation of what qualitative values this new life is to offer is not usually a strong point with apocalypticists. The visions are most often given in images. In Bjørneboe it is reasonable to interpret his vision of the future as tied to a society which to a greater degree than the present one respects a spiritual view of man, at the same time that it defends individual freedom. Hans Jæger himself is used by Bjørneboe as a spokesman for such values.

There he saw a sun-time dawning for Europe,
a new liberation, a waterfall, a weal
powered by a new history whose goal
was known as Mankind's Meeting with Itself.

( . . . )

And there will be no spring before all is burnt,
till all is burnt down into black ash
And fulled and purified in winter's cold!
Only then will the fire age and the ice age end.

Bjørneboe's critique of society in the fifties was in all essentials formed as a critique of the cultural life. The mood of crisis which marked postwar Europe was to Bjørneboe a consequence of the secularization of the spiritual life and the autonomy of the techno-culture. His orientation to the values of the past is nothing less than an attempt to establish a "Bjørneboean counterculture" opposed to the reigning thoughts and emotions of the time.

Not least has the dualistic, anthroposophical view of life helped create a counterweight to what he perceived as the total economization of existence. According to Rudolf Steiner it is difficult to talk about the higher values in a time like ours. Our conceptual apparatus has acquired its features and its meaning with reference to the physical world, and is poor in expressions which will serve for "the land of the spirit." Through certain exercises, such as concentration and meditation, the individual can nonetheless gain insights which point beyond the bounds set by agnostic science, a way of thinking which Bjørneboe believes has been dominant in Europe since Kant. Anthroposophy appears to be anchored in old, well-known Platonic ideas. We carry within ourselves ancient spiritual images from our final and original existence in the world of the spirit, despite the fact that we now find ourselves in the world of the Fall. A greater insight into the non-physical world is the goal of both the anthroposophist and the poet Bjørneboe.

If we look at the title poem "Ariadne" from the collection of the same name, the spirit's incarnation in the human being is essentially described as a pilgrimage through earthly existence. The goal is individually to acquire the greatest possible spiritual understanding while one is journeying under the stars—to the greatest possible degree to glimpse the god in the cards. It is in this endeavor that Ariadne's thread comes to our aid. Just as the legendary hero Theseus was helped out of the labyrinth with Ariadne's assistance, so too can we in our longing for perfection seek help in metaphysical wisdom. I shall content myself with quoting the last part of the poem:

If we are inside the cave, the lamp serves
only to make us more lost in the shadows;
Only our tentative fingers and feet
can trace down the one who followed us in.
The clew and the thread?

                                    Where was it we lost
the last, liberating contact with that?
Faint is the memory. Feel yourself back!
The dream and the thread shall rescue us all,
only the longing, the groping abides!

If you are Ariadne, the thread will conduct you
unerringly back to the wind and the ship!
There where the clear and the echoing waves
are cleft by the stem which sings in the water,
Our craft is propelled by Attica's oars
homeward to Athens, eternal and new!

Bjørneboe's retelling of myths—and fairy tales—is in the truest sense a defense of the legitimacy of the life of fantasy and feeling. The mythopoetic interpretation of existence through pictures and imaginative activity is regarded as of special importance in a time like our own, a time in which reason has a monopoly as the only medium of cognition. Naive evolutionary positivism, which recognizes only the natural sciences' mode of thinking, had an especially persistent and talented assailant in the poet Jens Bjørneboe.

For Bjørneboe fairy tales, like myths, form a deep and mysterious sounding board for the imagination. For him this is not identical with flight and unreality, but rather an especially sensitive apprehension of reality. The emotional insight into the fairy tales' imaginative world brings with it a surplus of spiritual capital —yes, the fairy tales are in fact children's helping hands over into the world of adults. This is the chief motif in Fairy Tales (1953). Of the fairy tale figures Joringel, Little Freddy and Cinderella, he writes:

And this was the help they could give you:
to let their own interior grow in you.
They remembered only dimly who they were.
You had space where they all could live,
and they all let their homelessness grow
and mount tall within you. That was an answer.

( . . . )
And whatever you may since then
have understood,
is rooted in those days of real time,
in the Enchanted Castle of the Feelings.

Fairy tales, like myths, are an important supplement to a onesidedly rational upbringing. Here too the Steiner School teacher and the poet Bjørneboe go hand in hand. Already in the first grade at the Steiner School fairy tales are on the timetable. The Steiner School saw it as a major task to stimulate the children's emotional engagement. What could serve better than fairy tales to give the children a chance to recognize and identify with important sides of themselves?

The timeless character of myths and fairy tales stood for a cognitive alternative to what Bjørneboe saw as the contemporary cult of reason. If you close the door to the myths' archetypical content, you also close the door to valuable experiences which lie in a common human heritage. For the Romantic poets as well as for Bjørneboe, myths, legends and fairy tales are to be regarded as reliquaries from a time when human beings stood in a closer relation to the riddles of existence. This childhood of humanity when most of the foundational experiences took place, it is the artist's task to give us at least give us a fleeting hint of.

The conception of the artist as more sensitive than other mortals to the mystical truths of existence is of course akin to the Romantic view of the artist. In "The Miller Boy" (1951) we meet the artist, the fiddler, as a medium for a higher power. Through concentration and introversion the artist is brought to mystic ecstasy, and finally also to a personal merger with "the God". It is this phenomenon which Meister Eckehart has characterized as "God's birth in the soul".

And slowly he becomes all vocal cord
and all violin and all hand,
while the God within him grows and waxes great
and resonates and burns under the skin.
And then, all unforeseen, two become one!
And this, this single one, it is the God!!

Adam, as we know, was not long in paradise. So it is too with the mystic's experience. The Miller Boy's exhaustion after his musical transport is described with the aid of a metaphor: " . . .the man falls / and lies for a long time like a felled tree." The unity has now been lost. The human being, in this case the Miller Boy, again finds himself a prisoner in the cave of shadow-existence.

In the poem "The Temple" (1953) we meet another artistic form of expression—the art of the word. Here it is the poet who becomes a medium for the supersensory reality. Welhaven would have nodded in agreement when Bjørneboe writes:

Along the verses' lucid ranks
flow my listening fingers.
Behind the colonnades of words
The holy spirit lingers.

To show the kinship with Romanticism, we also give a stanza from Welhaven's "Spirit of the Poem":

From language's strict construct,
from the thought-form's bond
mounts a liberated thought:
the spirit of the poem.

The basic attitude common to both is not exactly modesty on behalf of the profession to which they belong.

Bjørneboe does not act the zealous dogmatist, either as anthroposophical court poet or in the service of any other ideology. The dualistic concepts—as well as the Biblical material—seem to be an alloy of mixed intellectual traditions. Bjørneboe's use of Biblical themes in poetry has a different aim than religious proclamation in the traditional sense. Of the telling of Bible stories he says:

... thus Bible stories should show human existence under eternal conditions, the unbreakable inner laws and regulations. This experience of totality is not of a religious, not of an ethical sort. It is a poetic experience. A poetic understanding of an almost tragic nature. (8)

It goes without saying that Bjørneboe's interest in retelling the legends is not that of historical-critical biblical exegesis. It is on the contrary the idea of a spiritual, almost archetypical fellowship with the Bible characters which causes him to write about Abraham, Moses, Jeremiah, Judas and John—to name just a few of them.

The loveliest of these "Bible poems" is perhaps David Sings of Jonathan (1955). The many references in I and II Samuel to the friendship between King David and Jonathan provide the background for the poem. While the first stanza speaks of the beauty of kings' daughters, the following ones proceed to a description of Jonathan. Jonathan is "rain," "the well," "the water" which gives life and growing-power to David. Of David it is said that he "sprouted," "grew," "became an oak." The result has become an integrated poem, full of the intoxication of love. At the end the poem is resolved in the following crescendo:

You were as water in a mountain rill;
in your look and handclasp I have bathed.
And my song shall tell of our love
When all other songs have died away!

The poems with New Testament content occupy a quantitatively bigger place than the Old Testament ones. Here too it is primarily human universals that Bjørneboe is striving to capture. From his first collection we will take the poem "Iscariot." While the Bible itself does not give motives for Judas's betrayal other than economic gain—the thirty pieces of silver—Bjørneboe expands the Judas story into an independent and personal fiction. The sonnet about Judas receives—typically enough, given Bjørneboe's intent—the title Iscariot. He thereby avoids the biased negative associations of the name Judas. The poem is a rehabilitation of Judas's action. Someone had to take on himself the role of scapegoat, so that history could take its course:

They gave me thirty silver coins, and I
—suspecting something greater far in this—
accepted them and pointed out the man.
What would it all have come to without me?

The poem illustrates a central thought in Bjørneboe's view of the Bible and of history. Evolution always takes place through the outsiders, the traitors. It is in fact through the anti-heroes that the world is carried forward. Later in his writings this forms a pattern. The defenders of freedom and humanity must necessarily become traitors against what is officially accepted, against written and unwritten laws.

In the sonnet "Cimabue" (1951) we find in the midst of the crucifixion's scene of defeat a description of the triumphant Christ: "While in his hand the nail shines like a sun." The crucified one, who in the Jewish understanding was a totally failed Messiah, becomes a new confirmation of the "traitors" as the driving force of history. The poem points to the triumph of spiritual power—despite the apparent defeat.

Christianity has left its stamp on millennia; it has created our continent, it has formed our culture. To suppress the fact that Christianity is our foundation and our most central cultural possession would be tendentious. It would be a gross falsification of history. (9)

For the Bjørneboe of the fifties it is undoubtedly spiritual power, to a greater degree than material conditions, which determines the course of history. Gradually his idealistic conception would become somewhat more restrained. Not least the later influence of Bertolt Brecht seems to have been a welcome corrective to his own onesidedness.

Another red thread, especially in the poems from the fifties, is Bjørneboe's view of pain and suffering as sources for the richness of human experience. This tragic conception of reality is embedded inter alia in the above-cited "The Eternal Pains"—but perhaps most clearly in the poem cycle "The big city," which consists of 12 songs in all. The cycle, which gives its title to Bjørneboe's third volume of poems, approaches both allegory and apocalypse. The free, unrhymed stanzas and the symbols lead us into a world we could call modernist. Concerning man's tragic lot in existence we read in the tenth song:

Oh how I know this city,
every single stone
is to me a known pain
to hold in my hand!
( . . . )

And here we have the Street of the Weavers!
There we all went
to get our pattern woven.
The material for the weaving
we brought ourselves.

But the weaver's shuttle
often plowed deeply
under the skin,
for the Master thought,
he the Great Weaver,
that the pattern's durability was
of greater significance than tears.

Pain is presented as a necessary precondition for the experience of reality's being intense. From the esthetization of pain which we find expressed by Bjørneboe in the fifties the way is not far to a resignation to suffering in general. In a 1953 article Martin Nag comments on the poet's voluptuous fondling of concepts like suffering and want. On the basis of the debut volume Poems he declares that in fact Bjørneboe gives literary support to the Atomic-pact ideology and membership in NATO. The attitudes which the poems express are " . . . in the first place—an apotheosis of suffering as an ethical source of energy, and in the second place—propaganda for beauty in the hideous, the evil, the vulgar." (10)

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from Poems (1951)

Other poems from the 1950s

This page added May 1999; revised August 1999

NOTES

1. "Vanskelig ikke å være polemiker", Dagbladet 19 October 1951.    Back
2. "Poesien som livsansuelse. Jens Bjørneboe debuterer med dikt utenfor det vanlige", Verdens Gang 19 October 1951.    Back
3. Erling Christie, "Jens Bjørneboe ved en korsvei", Aftenposten aftnnr. 24 September 1958.   Back
4. Ibid., note 2.   Back
5. Bjørn Gabrielsen. "Samfunnsrefarmatoren Bjørneboe har premi&egreve;re." Interview with JB in Arbeiderbladet, 20 February 1965. Reprinted in Til lykke med dagen (Oslo 1965).   Back
6. Bjørn Gabrielsen. "Bjørneboe 20 †r etter, intervju med JB", Arbeiderbladet, 9 October 1971.   Back
7. Carl Frederik Prytz, "To debuterende lyrikere", Aftenposten, 27 October 1951.   Back
8. Jens Bjørneboe, Under en mykere himmel (Oslo: Gyldendal Norsk Forlag, 1976). "Det gamle testamentet og det enkelte barn" originally published in Ny Skole no. 5 (1953).   Back
9. ibid. "En julebetraktning," originally published in Ny Skole no. 4 (1955).   Back
10. Martin Nag. "Lyrikken i skyggen av A-pakten", Universitas 21 May 1953.   Back