Nocturne by Tomas Tranströmer

First published: 1962, as “Nocturne,” in Den halvfärdiga himlen; English translation collected in Twenty Poems of Tomas Tranströmer, 1970

Type of poem: Lyric

The Poem

“Nocturne” is a short poem in free verse, its sixteen lines divided into four stanzas. The title, suggesting a musical composition, establishes the mood of the poem. The night, in one of its traditional aspects, is a time for reverie, permitting the free play of thought and emotion expressed, for example, in the nocturnes of Frédéric Chopin. The poem is written in the first person. Sometimes poets use the first person to speak through a persona, whose outlook and experience may be quite different from their own. Here, however, no distinction is implied between Tomas Tranströmer the poet and the speaker of the poem. In the classic tradition of lyric poetry, the poet addresses the reader directly, with the authority of personal experience.

“Nocturne” takes as its point of departure an experience that will be familiar to most readers. When one is driving at night, objects that are caught in the beam of the headlights loom out of the darkness, almost as if they were moving forward. Instead of ignoring this trick of perception as one normally does, Tranströmer accepts it at face value. The scene is transformed, as in a folktale or dream. There is a childlike quality to this vision, too; the magically animate houses, which “step out/ into the headlights” as deer or cattle might, “want a drink.”

When the poet turns his attention to sleeping humanity, there is an important shift in perspective. In the second stanza, instead of speaking from immediate personal experience, the poet adopts the generalizing manner of the sage. The last two lines of the stanza in particular recall the voice of the Preacher in Ecclesiastes. (In Swedish, the quasi-biblical parallelism of these lines is even more pronounced.) Like the Preacher, but more gently, he records human folly.

In the third stanza, there is a shift back to immediate personal experience as the nighttime drive described in stanza 1 continues. Again the lyric vision is triggered by precise observation of familiar details: the “melodramatic color” of the trees caught in the headlights and the uncanny clarity of leaves illumined against the night. The metaphorical transformation enacted in stanza 1 continues here as well: The trees are granted sentience and mobility.

The fourth stanza concludes the poem yet leaves it open-ended. In stanzas 1 and 3, the poet has been seeing in the dark, thanks to the headlights of his car; now, in bed and on the verge of sleep, he is seeing in the dark in another sense. Tranströmer notes how the images one sometimes “sees” immediately before sleep seem to come from outside one’s consciousness, of their own volition.

Something from outside wants to get in—not to force entry, but to give a message. The poem concludes with another image that is rooted in a familiar sensation: the tantalizing experience of a revelation that cannot quite be grasped before sleep takes over.

Forms and Devices

References to music abound in Tranströmer’s poems. (By profession a psychologist, he is said to be an accomplished pianist as well.) Readers who know his work in Swedish lament the loss in translation of the music of his verse. A recording of Tranströmer reading his poems (The Blue House, Watershed C-214) is very helpful in this respect; “Nocturne” is one of several poems that he reads in Swedish as well as in English. Inevitably much is lost in transit between languages. Still, if it is true, as Robert Hass writes in his introduction to Tomas Tranströmer: Selected Poems, 1954-1986 (1987), that Tranströmer “has been translated into English more regularly than any European poet of the postwar generation,” much in his poetry must survive and even flourish in translation.

One reason that Tranströmer translates so well is that he is above all a poet of metaphor. “My poems are meeting places,” he has said. “Their intent is to make a sudden connection between aspects of reality that conventional languages and outlooks ordinarily keep apart.” What is particularly interesting about this credo is that it could serve equally well as a definition of metaphor.

“Nocturne” consists of a series of images in which one thing is seen in terms of something else. Most of the metaphors are implicit at least to some degree; the comparisons are not completely spelled out. For example, the poet never explicitly compares the houses that “step out” to animals, but his description unmistakably suggests the comparison. Some of the metaphors require a bold leap (it is surprising to think of houses transformed into living creatures), while others delight by their simple rightness (the flickering light on the trees from the passing car resembles firelight).

In “Nocturne,” many of the metaphors follow a common pattern, reinforcing one another. The pattern is established in the first stanza with the “Houses, barns, nameposts, deserted trailers” that “take on life.” In stanza 1, inanimate objects come alive; in stanza 3, trees are described in terms normally reserved for the animal kingdom: They are said to be “silent in a pact with each other,” as if they could talk if they wished, and they follow the poet home. In stanza 4, “unknown images and signs,” instead of being drawn by the poet, sketch themselves.

This pattern of transformation, which suggests a magical spell cast by the night, culminates in the image that concludes the poem: “In the slot between waking and sleep/ a large letter tries to get in without quite succeeding.” A letter is normally a passive object, but here the poet attributes will, intention, purpose to it. Not every metaphor in the poem, however, fits the pattern of passive-into-active. The “slot between waking and sleep,” for example, is a marvelous metaphor in which a unit of time—the brief interval of heightened receptivity before sleep—is described in terms of a unit of space.

It is characteristic of Tranströmer to end a poem with an enigmatic image which, like the last line of a haiku, requires the reader to make a connection with what has gone before. “After a Death,” “Out in the Open,” and “Going with the Current” are other good examples of Tranströmer poems with this kind of ending.