The Stones

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

Photo by Aron Fjell on Unsplash

The stones we’ve thrown I hear
falling crystal-clear through the years. In the valley
the confused actions of the moment
fly howling from
treetop to treetop, fade
in air thinner than the present’s, glide
like swallows from mountaintop
to mountaintop until they
reach the furthest plateaus
at the edge of being. Where
all our deeds fall
crystal-clear
toward no bottom
but ourselves.

---

In this piece, what might start as the literal echo of stones being thrown into a valley swiftly opens into a metaphor about our actions and their long reverberations in time. The stones we cast in our lives fall through the years and memory until they land in a more or less distant future and in the depths of our own being. Transtromer invites us to consider how each impulse becomes an echo across time, how every action occupies both a moment and an eternity, both the world outside us and the self within.

The poem’s narrative trajectory moves from chaos toward clarity. It opens in medias res, actions already in motion: confused momentary deeds fly from treetop to treetop, shrieking through the valley like restless birds. Tranströmer uses the valley’s acoustics and the image of startled creatures to symbolize how impulsive acts create a clamor in their immediate backdrop, as well as produce an initial sense of disorientation, a confused scramble of cause and effect in the heat of the moment. Over time, however, these once-chaotic actions undergo transformation. As perspective shifts, the dense air of the present thins into something more rarefied and the repercussions glide like swallows from mountaintop to mountaintop until they reach the farthest boundaries of existence, the swallow—a bird known for its hurried, gliding flight—expressing how consequences grow irreversible over time.

The swallows, or our deeds, arrive at “the furthest plateaus at the edge of being” in the idea of confronting existence itself. Here, the poem presents a vantage point beyond the very present, where we can look back at the totality of our actions with startling clarity. From the brink, we gain an almost eternal perspective, where time’s hold slackens and every deed becomes visible in context, stripped of its former confusion. Insight crystallizes. We realize our actions have been falling toward a single destination all along. Through our choices, we assume full responsibility for them.

The synesthetic quality of the poem is typical of Tranströmer, and even abstract concepts take on sensuous life, with time, for instance, being depicted as having thinner air at high altitudes of thoughts. Likewise, the poem’s soundscape moves from the harsh skränande (howling) of the immediate moment to the quiet tystnar (fading, falling silent) as deeds recede into the distance. By the final line, language itself is pared down to plain, weighted words, “no bottom but ourselves,” like stones coming to rest. Form and content converge. The poem’s clarity of meaning is matched by a clarity of sound and image.

The notion that our deeds ultimately fall into ourselves touches on memory and conscience, as the journey of the stones can be read as the journey of the self through time. After the initial tension of the moment subsides, experiences never vanish, they simply move out of sight, into the “thinner” air of the past and of the unconscious. There, they glide silently along the heights and depths of the psyche, continuing their flight internally. The concluding line implies the self is a bottomless well of echoes and everything we have done is retained there, even if its outward ripples fade. Every action sends out rings in the world at large. And those rings, eventually, return to their source.

---