by Vidar Hreinsson

ABSTRACT/RÉSUMÉ

Stephan G. Stephansson was a self-educated farmer, brought up amidst the strong literary traditions that formed a central part of the Icelandic culture of the countryside. This background gave Stephan the skill that enabled him to capture the experiences of the New World in words and images. The present paper examines the relationship between nature, culture and labour in Stephan's imagery. The analysis is inspired by Ricouer's ideas of metaphors being deviating extensions of meaning rather than simple substitutions. Such extensions are a form of creative growth, like the imagery in Stephan's poetry. Stephan's poems about nature transform natural phenomena into metaphors of human life, mainly with regard to growth, rebellion and compassion. On another level, labour and care turn nature metaphorically into a form of culture in such a way that it improves human life. The nucleus of Stephan's view of nature and life is found in the compound concept of care, that is to say, the combination of labour and care for natural growth and human abilities.

Stephan G. Stephansson était un fermier autodidacte, nourri par la tradition littéraire de la culture rurale islandaise. Ce bagage culturel lui a permis d'exprimer et décrire ses expériences du nouveau monde en mots et en images. Dans cet article, nous examinons les relations entre nature, culture et travail dans le language poétique de Stephan. L'analyse s'inspire des idées de Ricoeur sur la métaphore comme extension déviante du sens plutôt que substitution de celui-ci par quelque chose d'autre. De telles extensions représentent une croissance créative, comme l'est le langue poétique de Stephan. Ses poèmes sur la nature transforment les phénomènes naturels en métaphores de la vie humaine, centrés sur la croissance, la rébellion et la compassion. A un autre niveau, le travail et le soin transforment la nature métaphoriquement en culture, de façon à améliorer la vie humaine. Au coeur de l'attitude de Stephan vis-à-vis de la nature et de la vie se trouve un concept composite du soin, constitué par une combination de travail et de souci de la croissance naturelle et des aptitudes humaines.

One would hardly expect sophisticated poetry to issue from the pen of a "fjósakarl vestur undir Klettafjöllum" (a cowherd out west at the fool of the Rockies) (Bréf og ritgeröir I: 112) This, indeed, is how Stephan G. Stephansson described himself. He carefully maintained his personal identity as a hard working farmer, just as he valued and cherished his own cultural background. He grew up amidst the strong literary traditions of the Icelandic farmer culture, which nourished an unquenchable thirst for books and learning. Poetry lived at the core of this culture, helping to foster a highly developed figural language. It was an integrated part of people's daily lives, a method of dealing with the world in words. People spent days and nights reciting occasional poetry and rimur.

The thirst for reading, as well as the constant occupation with poetry and storytelling, created an intellectually fertile soil. It came to blossom in the cultural and literary revival of the nineteenth century, and this made the Icelandic immigrants to North America all the more receptive to a new world and a new experience. In Stephan G. Stephansson's poetry as well as in his prose, the wish to capture a whole new world in words is very apparent. Stephan's vocabulary is immense and varied. He invented new words and stretched the limits of language, especially when dealing with complicated ideas. Even in his letters, one finds his words sometimes falling automatically into rhyme and alliteration. However, it was not only a question of describing the world. What mattered more was digesting and conceiving it, extracting some meaning and sense from it, and clarifying its limitations as well as its potential.

Stephan was engaged in a constant dialogue with his world, trying to grasp it and address it, in poems and prose. His perspective however was always marked by the daily chores and priorities of the pioneer farmer. In the poem "Sumarkvöld í Alberta" (Summer Night in Alberta), he describes a close relationship to nature and a dependence on the unstable rhythm of agricultural labour:

who most preferably compose all my verses
to the notes of the moment in the weather of the day.

Later in the poem he describes the wilderness as a space necessary for freedom:

But this desert is thousand times more dear to me,
than the crowdedness of the larger and richer areas
because the space for life is narrowed in every way,
so that a third of the people are trodden down.

I love you, western wilderness, earth of life and help!
with your great space, and its room for high hopes,
for without you, there were no shelter against slavery
and the freedom of western world is a fairy tale and a lie.

For Stephan, the opposition of this space and freedom is the tendency of culture to cast everything in the same mould. This idea is further expressed in the first part of the long, narrative poem "Á ferd og flugi" (En Route), where the metaphorical personification of the river indicates the same dullness in human life. This is confirmed in the image of the prairie farms, which ends in a comparison to the human mind:

On the left hand, loitering through the mud-flats
the estuary-slow, muddy river
which doesn't raise afoot in waterfall
or swift current because life,
even that of the current, dies when waddling through time
with an armful of the flatland's blackest clay.

The individual new farms were standing in the fields
like coastal skerries in a clear, calm sea;
and all the buildings were also alike,
and the shape of every farm,
all the new-ploughed earth appearing as dark-shaded
and the blue-green colour of the fields identical.
Each human spirit must think the same way there,
each hand must be equally tame.

In the poem "Kurly" (Curly), Stephan describes an area that has been organised like a chessboard, each farm occupying its own rectangular square. This is once again contrasted strongly with the life-bringing freedom of the wilderness. The rectangular, rigidly organised areas seem narrow and choking.

These opposing poles of living wilderness and lifeless rectangularity reflect the well-known opposition between life-world and system, nature and culture. Humans belong to nature but distance themselves from it, while simultaneously working on it, creating their own culture. Man labours in order to transform nature into culture, to create his own regulated conditions of life. Yet there has to be a balanced union between the "natural" and "cultural" aspects of human life. A sense of the living forces of growth and decay, life and death, as well as a sense of the value of labour itself is essential for humans to function as living beings, so that they can understand the conditions of life. Yet this balanced sense of life is often lacking, especially when certain systemizing forces of society violate natural aspects of human life by exploitation and bureaucracy. It is necessary for each individual to find conditions for himself where he is comfortable, at least to some extent, where he is able to grow and develop himself, where his labour feels meaningful.

The effort to create and master one's own conditions in order to achieve growth is reflected in efforts to extend meaning in poetic language, which represents an opposition to the narrowing effects of systematic rationalism. The French philosopher Paul Ricoeur draws upon Aristotle's idea that mimesis, the literary imitation of reality, makes human actions better than they actually are. Ricoeur says that in a similar way "metaphor raises language above itself (Ricoeur 1981:181). According to him, a living metaphor is not simply a trope confined to the expression of a single idea or image, but rather a product of a larger context. Metaphor is not a technique based on a simple substitution, without any real extension of meaning, but rather imbedded in the context of a whole sentence, discourse, an entire world-view. Metaphor is "a momentary creation of language, a semantic innovation that does not have a status in the language as something already established, whether as a designation or as a connotation" (Ricoeur 1981:174). This momentary creation is not accidental, it is rooted in the world of the poet. It transforms his world into original poetry. The poet is addressing the entire world, and projecting his own world onto it, pointing towards potential worlds. In that sense, we can extract a basic set of ideas and metaphors from the poetic world of Stephan G. Stephansson.

Nature and farming provided Stephan with a huge surplus of meaning. His conception of nature, labour and culture is woven together into a genuine view of life, which is essentially based on the key features of labour and growth, often expressed in striking metaphors. Nature acquires meaning in his poetry, in a close affinity with human life.

Prankish humour is one of Stephan's characteristics. His down to earth view of life often appears in frank metaphors in his prose. In a reply to a man who criticised him for referring to spring as a female being (in spite of the fact that the word "vor" is a neuter word), Stephan said: "Sumir fraedimenn beita dómgreind sinni heist til Pess ad skoda undir rófuna á einstökum ordum. Pad er eflaust vísdómur út af fyrir sig, en sjaldan eru Peir menn andlega glöggvir" (Some scholars apply their judgement mainly to peek under the tail of single words. No doubt this is a science, as such, but these men are seldom intellectually perceptive) (Bréf og ritgerdir IV: 270).

Stephan's poems on nature establish an especially close metaphorical relationship between nature and human life. He felt compelled to present ideas, and this he tends to do by means of metaphors, mainly personifications. The poem "Ain" (The River) presents a lively picture of a river, revealing a dazzling variety of forms of life, as it issues from its source amidst clay and rocks:

Your cradle is where the gully gapes beside grim glacier-heads.
I know your upmost source, in a remote, uncultivated valley,
where there is not much of summer or sun and singing never comes to life
-you learned to walk in clay and boulders and the ice was your toy.

The speaker of the poem likes it least when the river is frozen, chained by winter. Indeed, the natural force of the river as it bursts loose expresses itself as a simile for the poet's mind:

But you are least of all to my liking
- although everything is shining smooth
- when winter has planed you and wrapped you in slippery ice.
I laughed when I saw you leap into action with heaps of broken ice
- but how did you know, that then the thaw was approaching?
And when you had freed yourself at last, you laid yourself as before
so clear and clean into a cleared path
as a sky-blue thread of silk
- as a thought, large and strong and free,
which strengthens me and cheers me up,
but struggles in the break of rhyme and language
and heaps up wrong alliteration.

The river struggles and breaks off the shackles in order to run smoothly thereafter. In the same way, the poet struggles with the restrictions of ideas, language, and poetic form until harmony is achieved. This struggle is a revolutionary force in human life, a revolt against stagnation and mental laziness.

In a poem on sculptor Einar Jónsson, Stephan wrote:

Your hands, Einar,
blew thought into the stupid clay.

In the same way as Einar brought clay to life, Stephan created metaphors by blowing new thoughts into the appearance of nature. Natural phenomena for him represent various ideas, but above all, challenges. Stephan felt at home in nature. Wrestling with it was a vital challenge.

The poem "Vid vatnid" (At the Lake) is a magnificent picture of a storm on a lake, but the last two stanzas transform the entire poem into a metaphor of human life:

Yes there is danger, yet life in this game!
As if every tiny drop is swelling and boiling
and every weak nerve is with the power of steel,
in your muscles and blood, you proud sea-goddess.
And the duty and core of life is to suffer
and to feel the pain in the storms of one's own times.
I sit here as a prisoner, having fled from sleep,
I feel like night is calling me as a witness:
to how spirit of time struggles with the ocean of mind,
until the temples wreck and the chains of state break,
listening to the screams and moaning of many hearts
in the sound of the breakers through the twilight of times

This call is a moral challenge, to announce solidarity with those who struggle and suffer pain. Those sufferings, however, also shake the foundations of government. Nature represents the challenges for the individual to take an empathic part in society.

At the beginning of the first volume of Andvökur, there is a poem in three stanzas, entitled "Bragamál" (On Poetry). This piece is an ode to poetry and its role in human life. It ends as follows:

You and your people will disappear without a trace
unless you deliver a poet as a present to the future.
The sunshine and small showers of rain
you shall entwine into a verse.
In rainstorm and thunder,
measure the strength of your alliteration!
So shall your people labour awake by day
the summer's work on land and sea.

In other words, poets and poetry are a gift to the future, and thus form a valuable element in a nation's culture. The two metaphors in the last stanza deal with capturing forces of nature in verse, and the simile contained in the last two lines adds labour, more precisely summer work, and cultivation to this picture. There we have a metaphorical union of nature, labour and poetry.

"To a Child" begins with a similar metaphor drawn from the weather:

Child with the temper woven from
early morning's tenderness and a thunder shower,
the weather in which everything grows,
the whole world is so new to you.

The metaphors for the rapidly swinging temperament of a child, the tender morning sun and the thundering rain, do not describe only temperament. They are also the essential conditions of growth, especially for the youth, for whom the whole world is new and fresh. The poem is in two parts and the first part deals with childhood, all the good and promising abilities, the frank and unspoiled curiosity, the potential growth. The fourth stanza runs as follows:

Although many a breach occurs in your wall of hopes and wisdom,
you have plenty of material equally good to repair it right away."

Once again we have the use of labour. The hayfield wall can be regarded as a symbol of labour of cultivation, but at the same time it is a metaphor of hope and wisdom. Thus labour goes hand in hand with wisdom and growth as a constantly renewing, growing force. The second part of the poem is a thematic repetition where the speaker of the poem wishes that he himself had the abilities and characteristics of the growing child, the child's teasing and industrious curiosity. This amplifies the meaning of the poem to cover life in general, the importance of maintaining the lively open mind of the child.

This then is a metaphor of self-contained growth, which reappears in countless variations in other poems. Among them is the following description of the literary culture as similar organic growth, in a memorial poem on Benedikt Ólafsson frá Eidsstödum:

In your upbringing, the hut-dwellers were not taught,
and the people were not forced into schools,
but sagas and poetry were a self-made education
which sang the knowledge and language into one.

The words "sjálftekin mennt" (self-made education) underline the natural impulse towards learning; the active acquisition of knowledge and poetry, which is comparable to the basic instincts of maintaining life.

The image of productive labour appears again and again. Farming has provided the poet's life and poetry with meaning. Effort carries with itself its own reward. On his own relation to education, Stephan writes:

I could grab from her
the berry-refuse she gave to me
while the tired one slept comfortably,
while the cheerful one was playing.

It is the effort to obtain education that counts, the desire to cultivate one's abilities. Later in this poem, Stephan expresses the value of labour in a religious metaphor:

If you wish to contribute anything
to the welfare of people,
do not hesitate to set your hand to it -
the strongest prayer is work.

The emphasis on the importance of labour as a contribution to slow but steady progress appears in many poems.

In "I rökkrinu" (In the Dusk) we see the metaphorical word "vongróinn," as a compound metaphor comprising both hope and growth:

From the twig, the only child of the highlands,
a wood-covered mountain-slope grew in the spring -
just as the grown hope of one's efforts is kept up,
it was not carried into the grave.
His narrow path becomes a public road
although the ages cover the footsteps with snow.

Man's efforts to cultivate and grow bear fruit, albeit at a very slow pace, are the nature of cultivation. The same idea appears again in "Braedrabyti" (Brother's Share), a poem on two brothers, who inherited barren and eroded land that had been overexploited. They chose separate ways of life, although they remained like brothers to each other. One of them exploited nature, broke gold out of the rocks, broke the land for money, and thus destroyed it. The other cultivated the land. The end especially draws upon the recurring metaphor of growth. The valley began to recover instead of being eroded. This process is described in metaphors of vegetation and the taming of nature. These metaphors reveal a Utopian vision:

In the shining clearing of green-leaved birch
a tall and huge tree grew,
and under this chieftain of the forest,
it is spoken of and taken for granted,
that is still to be found, the overgrown grave of the man
who was first to cultivate this forest,
and bound the sandstorm with sward-ropes.

Men bound their faith to these birch trees,
the best grown for the wishes of the friend
who established the districts of brotherhood,
with blooming fields and a sheltering maple,
who fastened the nights of dew,
who bound the roots of the mountains
and made rain and sunshine accustomed to pastures.

Ships built of these woods sail abroad, bringing with them the culture of the valley. Every spring, life awakens in the footsteps of this man, as if his hopes were still there and his mind lives within the vegetation:

And so it is in every spring,
when summer comes to the land
as if there were signs of life in the footsteps
of this passed and forgotten man,
as if his hopes are there in this land,
his spirit in the beautiful leaves,
his mind in the vegetation.

The conclusion of the poem is that one should not think in years but in ages; one should think of building up and growing a future, slowly and carefully. The aspect of binding and taming natural forces, something which is revealed in several metaphors, becomes a fundamental aspect of culture and the life of labour. This is a combination of nature and labour in which the labour is a natural impulse. The metaphors are in fact a part of, or rather an extension of, this joint activity.

This combination is expressed with a peculiar sense of harmony in Stephan's poetry and leads to a living dynamic that is necessary for everything. With regard to human society, to which all of us belong, growth and dynamics are a constituent part of Stephan's Utopian vision, his "possible world" as Ricoeur might express it.

An underlying idea in Stephan's poetic world is that of care, but care in a broad, philosophical sense, the nurturing care for everything that lives and grows. I mean to end, therefore, by looking into "Kveld" (Evening), a poem in which care appears in a twofold sense, metaphorically expressed with two Icelandic terms. First of all, care appears in the shape of "lifsönn"; "önn" here implies work and is related to "annast" which means to take care of:

But Care for life has seated herself in the door, nodding
she, who is my guard all day long,
who startled all my light-winged poems,
so that they fluttered away from me without song,
who broke the wings of the thought that flew off
and was meant for the heavens.

"Lifsönn" here is also labour, the farm chores that keep the poet awake, and stifle his thoughts and disturb his poems. The second idea is related to the exposed infants, those who died bereft of care:

But then insomnia appears, monstrous and pale
and stirs up my rest and calmness,
and the lost souls attack me,
those who betrayed the good that was in them,
and the exposed children of life howl loudly-
the talent who died bereft of care.

Canadian Ethnics Studies

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