LATE ARRIVAL ON EARTH
(1932)
FERRYMAN'S SONG (1941)
NON SERVIAM (1945)
STROUNTES (1955)
GUIDE TO THE
UNDERWORLD (1967)
Everyone is a world
Everyone is a world, peopled
by blind beings in dark commotion
against the self the king who rules them.
In every soul thousands of souls are trapped,
in every world thousands of worlds are hidden
and these blind, these underworlds
are real and living, though incomplete,
as true as I am real. And we kings
and princes of the thousand possibilities in us
are ourselves servants, trapped
in some greater creature, whose self and being
we grasp as little as our own superior
his superior. Our own feelings have taken
the color of their love and death.
As when a mighty steamship passes
far out, under the horizon, lying
in the evening glitter. – And we don’t know about it
until the swell reaches us on the shore,
first one, then another, and then many
which strike and boom until everything has become
as before. – Yet everything is different.
So we shades are troubled by a strange unease
when something tells us that others have gone ahead,
that some of the possibilities have been released.
Songs of something else. Selected poems by Gunnar Ekelöf translated by L. Nathan & J. Larson. Princeton, 1982, p. 45
