The bud held the shape all winter · a Wednesday letter

Dear you,

The bud held the shape all winter.

That line is Karin Boye’s. It arrives in the first stanza of a poem she published in the 1930s, called Ja visst gör det ont — “yes, of course it hurts.” It is about the pain of things that need to open. The line is doing what lines do when they are true: it holds an entire winter still, in seven words, then names what the winter was for.

Boye herself died young — forty-one, in April 1941, in a wood outside Alingsås. This poem was written years before that morning, but it feels like it knew.

Here is the first stanza, in Swedish and in the paper’s own rendering.

JA VISST GÖR DET ONT · Karin Boye, from För trädets skull, 1935

Ja visst gör det ont när knoppar brister.
Varför skulle annars våren tveka?
Varför skulle all vår heta längtan
bindas i det frusna bitterbleka?
Höljet var ju knoppen hela vintern.
Vad är det för nytt, som tär och spränger?
Ja visst gör det ont när knoppar brister,
ont för det som växer
och det som stänger.

YES, OF COURSE IT HURTS · the paper’s own rendering

Yes, of course it hurts when buds are breaking.
Why else would the spring hesitate?
Why else would all our warm longing
be bound in the frozen, bitter-pale?
The bud held the shape all winter.
What is this new thing that eats and splits?
Yes, of course it hurts when buds are breaking,
hurts for what grows
and for what closes.

Boye continued the poem — same rhythm, same tenderness, more stanzas after this. The whole poem is being printed as a broadside — one page, one poem, cream stock, the paper’s typography. Reply to this letter and it comes to your inbox.

Faith. Hope. Love.
— alice, from Hedegärde