Insects in Literature 7: Verner Aspenström

Drawing:

The Geometer Caterpillar

I stretch myself out from my cherry leaf
and gaze toward eternity:

eternity is far too vast today,
far too blue and thousand-mile.

I think I will stay on my cherry leaf

and measure out my green cherry leaf

From "Litania" 1952

Åsa Eriksson

The Butterfly

Flightiness' style is ill-regarded
but the butterfly employs it.

Stockholm is a steady city,
built of brick and iron girders.

You walk on the street. It begins to sway.
You are struck by strange gusts of wind.

Who carries on his back

these wavering stone heaps, this earth?

A butterfly that in its ill-regarded style
wanders in space around?

From "Trappan" 1964

Werner Aspenström in our hearts
by Gunilla Jansson

The Burying Beetle and a Butterfly

All around is summer with tall grass

and tumbling beetles.
Dandelions puff their white smoke
over the fluttering wooden crosses.
The burying beetle bores with its spade

deeper down into the sand,

arranges the fir-branch bed for its guest.
It knows nothing of summer's moment.
A butterfly flutters by

and flutters by again

in mother-of-pearl dress.

Slowly it rises from the cave,
feels suddenly all the earth's beauty
and pain.

From "Litania" 1952

When the editor, in preparation for this issue of Insectifera, asked me to suggest poems and prose depicting insects and butterflies, my thoughts turned naturally to the author and artist of life Werner Aspenström. Aspenström has received particular attention in recent months due to his passing in January this year. His Collected Poems sold out at the book fair in February within the span of an hour, his books have been in high demand at libraries, and he has been sought after at antiquarian bookshops. I made this discovery when the editor assigned me to write a few lines about this beloved author and also member of the Academy, and in connection with this I wished to acquaint myself more closely with his literature.

Aspenström's popularity is not surprising. He has strong roots in the Swedish national spirit. No one has depicted Swedish nature in such a concrete and brilliant manner as he has. Natural motifs came to accompany him throughout his entire authorship. In the poetry collection Poems Beneath the Tree (1956), in which he reveals himself as an imaginative nature romanticist, natural motifs are decisive.

An insect lover and entomologist reads Aspenström with great benefit. In Aspenström's lyric poetry we encounter the world of insects. The concrete and insignificant are brought forth into the light and become art and great poetry. The perspective is often from below, as in the small poem about the geometer caterpillar from Litania (1952), which can be enjoyed below together with an illustrative interpretation by Åsa.

Werner Aspenström was a true ecologist with an eye for the larger connections and the unity of existence. He directed his loyalty toward the heavy and earth-bound gray stone and the modest spruce bush instead of floating away in flights of fancy. "After having read 73 (excellent) poems about Icarus, I wish to put in a word for his country cousin the boy Graystone, left behind in the meadow," he says in the poem Icarus and the Boy Graystone (from Poems Beneath the Tree 1956).

I first became acquainted with Aspenström when I read his childhood memoir The Stream from 1958. Here we encounter symbols laden with mysticism, images and legends from Swedish high summer in a Bergslagen village: the red-topped cow, the forest, the cloud and the lake, water porridge, herring and potatoes, the pulled-out sofa in the cottage kitchen, childhood's stream that swirling finds its way through the uneven terrain and finally in a dizzying thought unites itself with the great Atlantic. Here too, as in the poem about the boy Graystone, the small and seemingly insignificant are given force and weight and placed in a larger context.

"I set these things aside, and what remains is simple starlight, in which all things are contained." With these weighty words, which indicate a direction for the future, Aspenström concludes his brilliant childhood memoir The Stream. Aspenström holds a rightful place in the hearts of every modern ecologist and nature lover.