Skipper's Tale

A poem by Tomas Tranströmer translated from Swedish by Daniel Carden Nemo

Photo by Nicolas J Leclercq on Unsplash

There are bare winter days when the sea is kin
to mountain country, crouching in a gray-feathered hide,
a brief minute blue, then long hours with waves like pale
lynxes pawing in vain at the shore gravel.

On days like this, shipwrecks rise from the deep in search
of their owners lost in the noise of the city, and drowned
crews drift landward, thin as pipe smoke.

(The real lynxes are up north, with sharp claws
and dreamy eyes. Up north where daylight
lives in a mine both day and night.

Where the sole survivor sits
by the Arctic lights and listens
to the music of those frozen to death.)

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The fifth of Tranströmer’s debut 17 Poems, “Skipper’s Tale” reads on the surface like a sailor’s ghost story told on a bleak winter day, but underneath, the poem threads symbolic nuances and personal fascinations with isolation, survival, memory, and the spectral traces of trauma, revealing the author’s ability to fuse the biographical with the universal. Born in Stockholm in 1931, Tranströmer spent his childhood in the Södermalm district and summers in the Stockholm archipelago, where his grandfather was a ship captain on the island of Runmarö. The young Tomas absorbed maritime lore and the rhythms of the Baltic waters, the experiences seeding his imagination with visions of the sea’s power and its secrets. It is no surprise then in “Skipper’s Tale” the sea is a living, shape-shifting presence. By using the objective correlative technique borrowed from his modernist idol, T.S. Eliot, the poet’s own psyche remains hidden behind the imagery to allow the winter seascape and Arctic night to embody unspoken moods and emotions.

The detail of a snowless, exposed winter in the opening line sets a tone of stark clarity and unforgiving light. In such moments, the sea suddenly resembles a range of hulking gray mountains “crouching in a gray-feathered hide”—the sea zoomorphized, cloaked in feathers like a giant brooding seabird or mythical creature. Rather than movement, the sea stands for stillness, expectant and watchful. Then come “long hours” of waves described as “pale lynxes pawing in vain at the shore gravel,” an image that conveys both wildness and futility. The waves are wild animals, yet “pale,” weakened and unable to gain purchase on land—in Swedish, literally “vainly seeking footing,” symbolizing the insubstantiality of nature’s assault on the mind, the way strong feelings or memories surge but can’t quite break into the solid ground of consciousness. The poem then slides into the supernatural. Tranströmer conjures a ghostly maritime folklore: the shipwrecks indicate that the past as well as the dead continuously seek the living. The drowned crew members, “thin as pipe smoke,” who resurface with the sunken ships from the depths, evoke a fleeting, ephemeral existence, nearly not there at all yet eerily present, like the wisps of memory, tenuous but haunting, refusing to stay buried in the sea’s unconscious. By contrast, the living have moved on, absorbed by their urban life, alienated by their own distractions.

“The survivor isn’t meant to tell the tale. The poem hints that to survive is to listen to what the dead have to say. The “music,” far from literal, becomes a sort of resonance with the past.”

The second half of the poem, moving away from metaphor back to the physical world—although the “real” world proves even more fantastical and harrowing than the wraithlike coast—turns everything upside down. It is the living who are compelled to seek the dead, to listen for their presence. The lynxes are now wild and untamed, with sharp claws. The clarity from the opening stanza is replaced by a country shrouded in darkness, where “daylight lives in a mine both day and night.” The perspective has flipped from those drowned in the depths to “the sole survivor” who listens to their music. Yet the survivor isn’t meant to tell the tale. The poem hints that to survive is to listen to what the dead have to say (hence the skipper’s tale is heard in the silence of the north). The “music,” far from literal, becomes a sort of resonance with the past. In a world where one can find oneself utterly alone in the cold cosmos, what remains to link them to others is the intangible. Music, memory, imagination. Tranströmer’s survivor under the Northern Lights calls to mind the existential image of Camus’s stranger under an indifferent sky, except here the sky isn’t blank, it swirls with eerie color and unearthly sound, implying that something transcendent or communal endures even in isolation. The far-north scene represents the psyche retreating into itself, to a place of darkness illuminated only by flickering cathartic lights, like the aurora of inspiration or insight, where one confronts the voices of their own frozen emotions or memories. The Northern Lights are likened to a fire, an ironic hearth, spectacular in color but providing no heat. The survivor, the one who has lived through catastrophe, sits in ultimate isolation, attended only by the “music of those frozen to death,” as the howling wind over ice and the uncanny shimmer of the aurora become the collective requiem of the perished, the sound of silence itself a spectral music the living can hear when stripped of all other noise.

The shift to the real north also has a mythic aspect. Parenthesized, the entire second section reads like an aside or a whispered secret of the poem. It could be the “true” skipper’s tale alluded to by the title, perhaps the story of an Arctic shipwreck of which only one man survived, the first part’s ghostly procession emanating from the narrative, the wreck and drowned crew those very souls frozen in the north, appearing on the southern coast on kindred winter days. Tranströmer sketches a world where the boundaries between reality and imagination, past and present, are porous, and the poem reads like a meditation on nature’s indifference and the human search for meaning amid silence and loss, where the symbols are portals into a shared reality.