Page:Von Heidenstam - Sweden's laureate, selected poems of Verner von Heidenstam (1919).djvu/31

 the hero, disillusioned after one of his amours, attacks relentlessly the glorification of sensual love. Care must be taken to regard the brutal downrightness of this speech for exactly what it is, i.e., the tirade of an undeceived sentimentalist.

The noblest poem of the volume is "." After the (as we should now call him) Bolshevist husband has in his imagination rung in destruction for the race of tyrant money-lords, his wife in turn mounts to the steeple. She beholds not "savage and weaponed men" or "kindled cities aflame," which would be but a repetition of former evils, but a festal "brothering-day" of mutual forbearance and love, with the motto:

Other types and themes are included in the Poems. There are historical and imaginative narratives reminiscent of his earlier work. In "" he approaches the folk-song quality of Fröding, though with much more sophistication. The short lyrics of self-scrutiny continue, in a tone that would be morbid except for its intensity. Heidenstam's increase of mastery is mainly shown in his contact with the Sweden of today.

After a long interval filled with prose works, appeared in 1915 the New Poems. In these we find that Heidenstam has evolved from an inspired thinker to a leader. His style, wholly lucid and