Heinesen's Poems

Af : W. Glyn Jones

William Heinesen stands as one of the Danish outstanding poets of the twentieth century. He was 21 when he published his first volume of poems, and 72 when he wrote the volume he talked of as being intended as a farewell to his friends - though, he commented 12 years later, it was followed by many more farewells. Like his prose, his poems reflect changing attitudes and feelings and experiences over a long life, but they do so more directly and more succinctly, but with the same degree of variation.

It is said that it rains every day in the Faroe Islands. So it does. But then, the sun shines every day there, too. Heinesen’s poems reflect this, in both literal and figurative senses. In their reflection of the rhythm of the Faroese day and of the Faroese year, the alternation of dark and light, the early poems especially contain, in all their linguistic and metaphorical beauty, a strong element of melancholy and a noticeable preoccupation with death. This was reinforced by the death of the poet’s brother at the age of 24 in 1927, and it is certainly possible to talk here of life consistently seen against the backdrop of death.

In the 1930s, things changed, and a political element began to make itself felt Heinesen saw the threat from totalitarianism. The sense of foreboding is accompanied by bitingly ironical poems aimed at an apparently lack of concern elsewhere: in London, a bus can disappear into the end of the world without anyone noticing, and the ceremonies commemorating the unknown soldier are what hurts him most. Scathing satires like these, in which Heinesen moves from his earlier fairly regular rhythms and rhymes into free verse, alternate with a whole section entitled "The Child and the Summer’s Day" reflecting his love of children and suitably written in simple, rhyming verse.

By 1961 Heinesen became even more political in a collection entitled Hymn and Song of Indignation, which looks at indifference to suffering and foresees the end of the world brought about by pestilence and atomic weapons. He returns to this theme in his last collection Panorama with Rainbow, from 1972, though, as the title suggests, the implication is one of hope despite the cynicism and brutality which he sees around him.

Although the links between Heinesen’s poetry and Danish poetry earlier in the century are unmistakable, his perspective is a different one, and his poems are ultimately unlike any others. He builds mainly on traditional and early modern forms, but he does occasionally indulge in experimental poems and certainly experimental imagery - at times almost in the style of Picasso’s paintings. And he shows throughout that he is one of the giants of the century in his linguistic inventiveness and sense of sound and rhythm.