Strophe and Antistrophe

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

Photo by Bruno Ramos Lara on Unsplash

The outer ring belongs to myth. There the helmsman sinks upright
among the glint of fish-backs.
How far from us! The day stands
in a windless tension—
Congo’s green shadow
holds the blue men in its mist—
and the heart’s slow river
fills with driftwood.

Then a sudden shift: beneath the heavenly bodies at rest
the tethered ones slide through.
A dream’s hull rises by the stern
in a hopeless position, black
against the rosy coastline. Abandoned,
the years fall away quickly,
without a sound—same as the sled’s shadow, doglike, huge,
races over snow,
reaches the woods.

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“Strophe and Antistrophe” packs an epic intuition into a brief lyric form, from a mythic periphery to the river of the heart and then into a sudden night where dreams are wrecked and shadows take flight. The piece opens by thrusting the reader into the realm of legend or archetype, as we are met by the haunting image of a sailor going down with his ship yet remaining eerily erect, frozen in his heroic descent. With no narrator present, nature and myth take center stage. All figures are absorbed by the landscape into obscurity, everything fills, clogs up, until movement is impossible. The day itself “stands / in a windless tension” as if holding its breath in the stifling calm. The exotic, cryptic scene of the Congo casting its green shadow suggests a primal darkness looming over the present daylight, likely reflecting Tranströmer’s youthful fascination with Africa. Yet that whimsical outer world feels unreachable (“How far from us!”), reinforcing the notion of myth and the orality of the tale, distancing “us” listeners from the legendary past. In a state of uneasy stillness, the heart contains a “slow river,” its emotional life, cluttering with driftwood. The metaphor turns invisible feelings into a concrete scene of natural debris piling up. It conveys emotional burden and accumulated memories that block the heart’s flow. The pattern—outwardly calm imagery concealing intense undercurrents—is typical of Tranströmer’s lyric approach, painting a soul in limbo, external lore lying distant and inaccessible while internally the self is choking, stagnant. Caught in a suspended tension, the outer circle of myth and the inner world of the heart reflect one another.

At the poem’s midpoint comes a volta (“Then a sudden shift”) that heralds the second movement, the antistrophe, which answers and counterbalances the first. Where the strophe was suffocating and still, the antistrophe brings motion and release. Under the silent stars, something long held in check is quietly set in motion, the “tethered ones”—in Swedish tjudrade, “the tied-down,” perhaps referring to beasts of burden or any bound souls that were staked in place, but also echoing the helmsman in the first stanza—now finally glide forward in a gentle, nocturnal movement that produces a liberation from the earlier paralysis. Navigation and dream merge into each other “in a hopeless stance.” The ground is unstable and orientation is futile. The wrecked ship in the hull of the dream evokes a grand illusion or ambition that has run aground, what once sailed in the imagination now standing abandoned, half-sunk, in the clear light of reality. In its wake, time itself seems to lurch forward as “the years fall away quickly,” like a sled that rushes across the snow chased by its own shadow, intangible yet unshakable, racing alongside and then ahead of the sled, disappearing into the trees, same as fate or the specter of time and death pursuing and ultimately outpacing the living. The sled, or life’s journey, can’t outrun its dark shadow. Slipping into the woods, into the unknown, the shadow reminds us that beyond the edge of reason and understanding lie life’s opaque mysteries. “Strophe and Antistrophe” presents existence as a dialectical movement, a chorus that offers no resolution despite its symmetry, that denies its audience any clarity or control and prompts us to inhabit the tension between life’s conflicting energies. Its figures are merely puppets in the hands of larger forces: myth, time, and the unconscious.