One of the great things about blog-writing is that you get the occasional chance to be unashamedly selfish. Another positive is that you get a chance to write things down before they drift out of your memory forever. This post takes advantage of both of those aspects. Warning: if you're not much into reading poetry written by half-tanked university students, you might like to skip over this one...
A little over 14 years ago, I was a student up very late one night in my warm cozy ground-floor dorm room in Värmlandsstudenthem (Värmland province's student dormitory) on Torsgatan (Thor's Street) in Uppsala, Sweden. On the desk in front of me were various tomes from Uppsala University's amazing "kingly" library covering topics from Old Icelandic to runic inscriptions, Scandinavian place and personal name etymology, and even Anglo-Saxon verse, along with an impressive assortment of dictionaries (Old-Icelandic to Swedish, Swedish to Swedish, Swedish to English, etc.). Outside, the night was crisp, still and sharp as a blade, with the snow-blanketed old buildings awash with the bright glow of a late-winter moon. I was 22 years old.
I was slightly fuzzy from the effects of a moderate drink-up with some dorm friends down at one of the local student pubs, but I had homework to get done before the following morning's Old Icelandic class. Somehow, drinking some ale before reading poetry from vikings seemed somewhat appropriate...
I was struggling to get my head around the various verse forms and rules of Old Icelandic poetry - especially the dróttkvætt (or skaldic "lordly" metre). With all the complex rules of this verse form (which is extremely elaborate and demanding), my head was in a spin, and I abruptly decided the best way to get a feel for it all was to write my own poem in English applying the dróttkvætt verse rules.
Still half-cut, about 30 minutes later I found the following poem scrawled on a piece of notebook paper in front of me:
Beneath stars’ northern dome
night breathes on, steely bright.
That silver soul sails, roams –
a sword of lordly white.
Feel the old oak aching
and ageing – those sages
sing with songs of making:
soft sighs from dry pages.
Mountains now moan along,
mourning (morning) stone slowly born
in the whirling wheel’s song –
warning of time long gone.
Deep the rocky root dips,
dreams in seams (seems) under ground –
into sealed silence… slips!
sleeping and weeping wound.
Though weightless (waitless) is water,
and willing to laugh still;
merry without mortar,
mirth-swilling winding will.
Happy, hopeful ever,
high hills to sea (see) sighing –
this cleaving weaving clever
queen serenely dying.
It lingers now, and leaps and laps
light from an old bright-hewn gown;
glimmering and gleaming it traps
the glints from a long-drowning crown.
The first three verses there pretty much obey all the central rules of dróttkvætt: 8 lines per verse, 6 syllables per line with three 'lifts' in each, alliteration, consonant rhyme (skothending - for example Beneath stars’ northern dome and Though weightless is water) in odd lines and internal rhyme in even lines (for example, mourning stone slowly born and dreams in seams under ground), though I did away with trochees in favour of creating alternating end-rhyme to appeal more to the modern English-speaking ear. The final verse is basically in hrynhenda verse (the same as dróttkvætt except with 8 syllables per line).
In addition to pulling off not one but three full verses in dróttkvætt, I was even more surprised to see that I'd actually written something that might mean something. I'm still not exactly sure what, but I think the verses capture the moment and the feelings from that exact moment in Uppsala - a crisp late-winter night on the cusp of spring under a bright moon and contemplating the passing of time over ancient poetic verse with piles of old books on the desk in front of me. It's almost as if the strict conditions of the verse took up all my concentration, and then raw thoughts and feelings direct from the deeper subconscious poured out onto the page - guided into form not by me but by dróttkvætt itself...
In any case, it's the first and possibly only piece of writing I've done that might qualify as half-baked poetry (or else the first proof that poetry wasn't really for me after all!). The original piece of note paper has long since vanished, and it has become increasingly difficult to recall the poem in full. Thought I should write it down here before it "serenely dies" and I lose all the "glints from a long-drowning crown"...
:-)
