Sibelius

When he closed his eyes he saw a late summer’s afternoon,

The sun slowly sinking towards the horizon,

The scent of geraniums in the windowsill,

In the house, as tea was being served,

While his beloved aunt played the piano…

The little boy crawled beneath her feet,

And the music flowed over him, the sounds were colours

In the carpet, they were glittering spheres in the air,

And in the woods he could understand

The birdsong, the most refined differences of pitch,

And at dusk among the trees he could see them,

Trolls and goblins and witches,loomoing.

He leaned the names of all the ships in the harbour,

And made little wooden boats with his own hands,

Then launched them ,watching them sail out of sight.

Already there was melancholy in the joy,

His father’s ghost in the house filled with books,

And all he could remember was sitting in his lap,

Looking at animal pictures in a book,

And the pungent smell of cigar smoke;

While his father lay in a coffin in the drawing room,

Little Jean played with a hunting horn,

And when the coffin was carried out, he started up

With his favourite song, “Run away, good reindeer!”

And afterwards he asked his mother again and again:

“Won’t papa ever come back, however many times I call him?”

Mother told her thoughts to no one but God,

Prayers and premonitions her obsession,

Withdrawn behind the blinds, in mute confession,

Withholding her mystery with exquisite cruelty.

At dawn the fields and forests were covered

With mist, and suddenly a woodlark flew straight up

And hovered still for a moment, then vanished,

And the trick was to shoot at just the right moment,

When the bird paused in the sky, as an act of grace.

He would take his violin with him out into the countryside,

And climb up onto a rock by the shores of Lake Vanajavesi

And play concertos to the birds,and,in his sailing boat,

Weaving among the archipelago’s isles,

He stood at the prow, improvising to the waves,

Praying for some mermaid to surface and take him

Down into the deep, that he might never return.

He roamed the butterfly summer, running his hand

Over sculptures of music in the air, thrilling to shapes

And volumes, laughing with sky-blue mischief;

Exultant animal trembling with sensation’s fire,

He wandered alone along the beaches of the Gulf,

Bathing and sunning his naked body on the rocks

Under sweet-smelling pines, while the waves

Chanted the Kalevala, and lifted him on swans’ wings.


Tall and pale, he stretched out his arms in flight,

Lifting the orchestra, trembling with the weight of the earth,

Embracing it, as the universe surged through him,

His blue eyes hypnotising the air into revelation.

His great troll’s head and thin-lipped mouth

Glowered with suffering, his large ears tuned

To subtle harmonics; exultation and despair were one

In his rude primeval force, never still from moment to moment,

Always about to explode in jovial farce.

At his villa on the wooded slope overlooking Lake Tusby,

Where foals and sheep would nose through the doors,

He stood scanning the skies with binoculars, following

The geese in flight over the lake, and hearing the screech

Of cranes, and the curlews’ cries echoing over the marsh.

Anamnesis was salvation; to descend into the underworld

And bring back wisdom, then strive forth with greater strength,

To discover the secret ,to become more than human;

Observing the movement of water, how the river’s flow

Determined the shape of its bed, he began to understand.

Then ,one autumn, he travelled to the Koli mountain, in Karelia,

And climbed to the summit, in the fierce cold, with the wind

Singing through him, through cold sparkling sunlight

And sudden hailstorms; from the top, wherever he turned

He saw wonder; blue-grey waves, white cliffs, endless forest,

The past and the future both contained in the present,

Urging him to concentrate, sublimate and abstract.