Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

In "Tornfallet," Joseph Brodsky explores the depths of love, loss, and longing through the vivid imagery of a Swedish meadow. The poem resonates with melancholy and contemplation, providing an intimate look at love that transcends physical boundaries and enters the ethereal realm. The poem is a narrative journey through different emotional states, framed by the meadow that serves as the protagonist's resting place and the focal point for his memories and thoughts.

The opening stanza sets the scene and establishes the narrator's emotional state with the words, "There is a meadow in Sweden / where I lie smitten." These lines evoke a sense of desolation, but also of attraction or enchantment. The word "smitten" can imply both love and affliction, which immediately introduces the dual themes of love and suffering that pervade the poem.

The narrator describes his "widow" roaming the meadow, plaiting a clover wreath for her lover, presumably the narrator himself. The wreath is symbolic of a love that persists beyond death, a natural tribute woven from the very meadow that holds the narrator. This image resonates with the pastoral, evoking the eternal themes of love and mortality within the natural world.

The marriage scene encapsulates the elemental aspects of their love, situated in "a granite parish" with snow lending "her whiteness" and a pine serving "as a witness." The choice of granite reflects something enduring, and the natural elements involved in the ceremony, such as snow and pine, establish their love as something pure and primal. The diction is terse, but each word is loaded with symbolism.

The narrator's mention of the "oval lake whose opal / mirror, framed by bracken, felt happy, broken" reveals a nuanced emotional state. The lake is described as an "opal mirror," perhaps indicating depths that are beautiful yet hard to discern, much like the emotional depths of the narrator and his lover. The word "broken" further intensifies the sense of loss and fragmentation.

As the poem reaches its climax, the narrator hears his widow's "descant" singing "Blue Swallow," a song he "can't follow." This moment encapsulates the gap death has caused; despite their deep emotional connection, there is a chasm now that he can't bridge. The final stanzas depict the narrator lying "dying," eyeing stars, with Venus in sight and "no one between us." The celestial imagery conveys a sense of elevation and eternal continuity, even in the face of impending death.

The poem employs a consistent rhyme scheme and straightforward language, but the emotional and thematic weight of the words are complex and multilayered. In its brief span, "Tornfallet" confronts love, mortality, and the natural world in a deeply intimate narrative. It portrays a love so transcendent that it reaches into the afterlife, an emotion that remains as enduring as the granite and as constant as the stars. The poem is a poignant tribute to the complexities of love, rendered in the simple yet evocative imagery of a Swedish meadow-a space that becomes, under Brodsky's touch, a universe unto itself.

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