ABSTRACT
Sensitive to the natural world, to everyday city life, and metaphysically inclined, Rolf Jacobsen (1907-1994) was one of Norway’s premier modernists. He does not so much announce or bewail the solitude of Urban Man and the loss of traditional spiritual beliefs, as attempt to come to terms with them in a gently persistent, inquisitive manner. Jacobsen himself wrote that “the age of the great symphonies / is over.” His concise, sometimes slightly surreal imagery takes off from this historical fatality—which he seems to accept with a sort of melancholy stoicism. “Acceptance” is in fact a key notion. Other poems concern “accepting” fleeting time and death. Syntactically, his poems are crystal clear; the characteristic mystery enveloping their meaning is not that of hazy writing but rather that of life itself—our anxiety and bewilderment at being “far from home,” as the poet observes, attributing these words to a street lamp “glacially alone in the night.”
