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"Karin Boye is Sweden's greatest woman poet. Born in 1900, she was a poet of ideas, and wrote a powerful prophetic novel, Kallocain. Her involvement in the radical literary and artistic movement Clarte during the 1920s led to her interest in psychoanalysis, which influenced her literary work as well as her personal development during the latter years of her life. Intellectually and emotionally, she was far ahead of her time, and her controversial writings included the novel crisis, in which she depicted the religious turmoil of her adolescence and her discovery of her own bisexuality." "David McDuff's edition shows Karin Boye moving from youthful idealism to a desperate quest. In the early poems, she is a tense modern spirit aroused to strenuous affirmations of absolute ethical loyalties - but prone also to drift passively back into regions of the subconscious and the unconscious, where mysterious natural forces take possession of the human spirit. Her identification with nature's dark but knowing and fertile instincts becomes more complete in her later work, in which serene nature symbolism is mixed with ominously strained elements."--Jacket.… (more)
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You Are My Purest Consolation
You are my purest consolation,
you are my firmest protection,
you are the best thing I have,
for nothing hurts like you.
No, nothing hurts like you.
You smart like ice and fire,
you cut like steel my soul -
you are the best thing I have.
Yes, of course it hurts
Yes, of course it hurts when buds are breaking.
Why else would the springtime falter?
Why would all our ardent longing
bind itself in frozen, bitter pallor?
After all, the bud was covered all the winter.
What new thing is it that bursts and wears?
Yes, of course it hurts when buds are breaking,
hurts for that which grows
and that which bars.
Yes, it is hard when drops are falling.
Trembling with fear, and heavy hanging,
cleaving to the twig, and swelling, sliding -
weight draws them down, though they go on clinging.
Hard to be uncertain, afraid and divided,
hard to feel the depths attract and call,
yet sit fast and merely tremble -
hard to want to stay
and want to fall.
Then, when things are worst and nothing helps
the tree's buds break as in rejoicing,
then, when no fear holds back any longer,
down in glitter go the twig's drops plunging,
forget that they were frightened by the new,
forget their fear before the flight unfurled -
feel for a second their greatest safety,
rest in that trust
that creates the world.
There is something in these lines which makes me want to crawl away to some secluded corner, and be very quiet with myself... Powerful, in ways I am not always able to understand.