Sweden's Laureate: Selected Poems of Verner von Heidenstam/The Burial of Gustaf Fröding

by Carl Gustaf Verner von Heidenstam

THE BURIAL OF GUSTAF FRÖDING.

Forth they go
In endless procession
One by one with their silent tread.
Bells are tolling. Deep, slow,
With rumbling vibration
Singing their song to the march of the dead,

I hear, as I sit half-dreaming,
The bell-notes that beat from miles away.
All of our land, beneath winter gleaming,
Hears the bells as they ring to-day.
Summer were you and blossoming spring,
Sigh of the reeds by lake-lapped strands.
Sleep, O singer, whose bier they bring
Borne by a thousand hands.

White was your hair, and long your beard;
The sun shone in on your Bible's page,
And you in your bare-walled room appeared
Like Job mid his ashes, bent with age.
How wondrous great is man's destiny:
Dreams and old tales and the flowing sea,
Floods and flames and the choir of the storm!—
But weak as a reed is his own frail form.

Die, die!—so echoes the cry
To him that creates with yearning passion.
All must perish,
All that is earthly must die, must die;
But no, 'tis himself that his strong hands fashion.

Pass, O bard, erect as a king.
To the host of the shades through the darksome portal!
Still we cherish
Your limpid-silvery notes immortal.
Singing to us as they used to sing.