Born on July 20, 1864, Erik Axel Karlfeldt became one of the defining Swedish poets of his generation by returning again and again to the landscapes, seasons, traditions, humor, music, and rural life of Dalarna, the province where he grew up. His poems are deeply local, filled with farms, forests, flowers, harvests, old customs, changing weather, and the rhythms of agricultural life, yet Karlfeldt rarely treated the countryside as simple decoration. The landscape became a way of thinking about love, aging, memory, desire, belonging, loss, and the passage of time.
Karlfeldt’s literary career was closely intertwined with Sweden’s most important cultural institution. He joined the Swedish Academy in 1904, became involved with its Nobel work, and served as permanent secretary from 1913 until his death in 1931. During his tenure, the Academy became more open to newer literary voices and elected Selma Lagerlöf as its first female member.
His relationship with the Nobel Prize was unusually complicated. Karlfeldt had been nominated repeatedly during his lifetime, but as a member of the institution responsible for selecting the literature laureate, he reportedly declined the possibility of accepting the honor while he was alive. After his death in April 1931, the Academy awarded him that year’s Nobel Prize in Literature for his poetry.
The result placed him in a very small and unusual category: a Nobel laureate who never lived to receive the prize that secured his international place in literary history.
🌾 A Childhood in Dalarna
Erik Axel Karlfeldt was born Erik Axel Eriksson at Tolvmansgården in Karlbo, in the parish of Folkärna in Dalarna. His family belonged to a long tradition of farming and mining in the region, and the physical world surrounding his childhood would remain central to his imagination for the rest of his life.
Dalarna occupies a particularly important place in Swedish cultural identity. Its red-painted farmhouses, forests, lakes, traditional costumes, folk art, midsummer celebrations, music, and agricultural history have long been associated with an idealized image of Swedish rural life. Karlfeldt knew that world from within rather than as a tourist looking backward nostalgically.
His poetry would later draw heavily on its rhythms and imagery, but he did not simply reproduce local traditions. He transformed them into an elaborate poetic landscape populated by farmers, lovers, biblical echoes, mythological figures, flowers, musicians, wanderers, drinkers, dreamers, and one particularly important recurring figure named Fridolin.
The local became literary.
📚 Education and a Changing Family Life
Karlfeldt attended school in Västerås and completed his secondary education in 1885. He then entered Uppsala University, beginning what would become a long and sometimes interrupted period of study.
Money was a persistent concern. Karlfeldt did not move effortlessly from prosperous childhood to comfortable academic life. His family’s circumstances became more difficult, and he repeatedly had to interrupt his studies in order to work. He supported himself through teaching, journalism, and other employment while continuing his education.
These experiences placed him between different worlds. He knew rural agricultural life intimately, but he also entered universities, libraries, newspapers, literary circles, and eventually Sweden’s most prestigious cultural institutions.
That movement never caused him to abandon Dalarna.
If anything, physical distance made the region more powerful in his imagination.
Karlfeldt eventually completed his university studies in the 1890s, earning qualifications in subjects that included literature, aesthetics, and languages. By then, however, his real vocation had already become clear.
He was writing poetry.
✒️ Becoming Erik Axel Karlfeldt
Karlfeldt was not born with the surname by which he became famous.
He adopted the name Karlfeldt in 1889, deriving it from the family farm and his home region. The change carried a symbolic quality appropriate for someone whose poetic identity would become so strongly connected with place.
Names mattered in his work.
So did invented identities.
Karlfeldt would later create Fridolin, a semi-fictional poetic personality through whom he could explore rural life, romance, humor, scholarship, desire, and belonging without writing straightforward autobiography.
The name Karlfeldt similarly connected the poet with a chosen literary identity rooted in the world he had come from.
🌲 Songs of the Wilderness and of Love
Karlfeldt’s first major collection, Vildmarks- och kärleksvisor, usually translated as Songs of the Wilderness and of Love, appeared in 1895.
The title already reveals two of the forces that would repeatedly meet in his poetry: nature and desire.
The wilderness is not empty.
It contains human emotion.
Love is not separate from season, landscape, agriculture, fertility, weather, and the natural world.
Karlfeldt’s poems often create the sense that human life participates in the same cycles governing fields and forests. Spring awakens desire. Summer ripens. Autumn brings harvest and decline. Winter creates silence, memory, and waiting.
This seasonal imagination became one of the most characteristic elements of his verse.
His poetry also demonstrated an unusually rich command of Swedish. Karlfeldt delighted in dialect, older words, folk expressions, biblical language, literary allusion, song traditions, and the sound of spoken Swedish.
Translation can communicate his subjects.
It is much more difficult to reproduce the full music of his language.
🎶 The Arrival of Fridolin
Karlfeldt’s breakthrough came with Fridolins visor, or Fridolin’s Songs, published in 1898.
Fridolin became one of the most memorable figures in Karlfeldt’s poetic world.
He is not simply the poet in disguise, although elements of Karlfeldt clearly enter the character. Fridolin can be understood as a cultivated countryman who inhabits several identities simultaneously. He knows books and learning but remains connected to the land. He appreciates rural traditions without being intellectually confined by them. He can be humorous, romantic, sensual, reflective, learned, and earthy.
That combination gave Karlfeldt enormous freedom.
Through Fridolin, he could write about country life without adopting the detached voice of an outsider. At the same time, he could introduce classical references, biblical echoes, cultural history, and sophisticated literary technique into apparently rustic songs.
Fridolin stands between the university and the farm.
In many ways, Karlfeldt did too.
🌻 Fridolin’s Pleasure Garden
Karlfeldt returned to the character in Fridolins lustgård, or Fridolin’s Pleasure Garden, published in 1901.
By then, his reputation as an important Swedish poet was well established.
The book expanded the world he had been building, combining folk tradition, courtship, nature imagery, humor, sensuality, and reflections on culture and history.
Gardens became especially useful symbols for Karlfeldt because they occupy a boundary between wilderness and cultivation. A garden is natural, yet human beings shape it. Plants grow according to biological laws, yet people choose what to plant, prune, gather, and protect.
Poetry can function similarly.
Language grows from inherited speech, tradition, memory, and culture.
The poet cultivates it.
Karlfeldt’s work repeatedly reveals this tension between natural spontaneity and meticulous craftsmanship.
His poems can sound like songs that have always existed.
They were carefully made.
🌺 Flowers, Fruit & Symbolic Landscapes
Plant imagery became so central to Karlfeldt that several major collections incorporated botanical imagery directly into their titles.
Flora och Pomona, published in 1906, invokes Flora, the Roman goddess associated with flowers and spring, alongside Pomona, the goddess of fruit trees and abundance.
The combination suits Karlfeldt perfectly.
Flowers represent beauty, desire, fragility, youth, and seasonal awakening.
Fruit suggests ripeness, harvest, fulfillment, maturity, and approaching decline.
His natural imagery therefore operates simultaneously on several levels. A flower can simply be a flower, vividly observed and appreciated. It can also become an image of a person, a season of life, a relationship, a memory, or the briefness of beauty.
Karlfeldt’s countryside is rarely static.
Everything is becoming something else.
📖 Working in Libraries
While establishing himself as a poet, Karlfeldt also built a professional career around books and institutions.
After completing his studies, he worked at the Royal Library in Stockholm and later became librarian at the Royal Swedish Academy of Agriculture.
The position brought together two worlds that had always mattered to him.
Books and farming.
Intellectual culture and rural life.
Libraries offered Karlfeldt something different from the countryside, but not necessarily something opposed to it. His poetry thrives precisely because he had access to both inherited rural culture and a broad literary education.
Classical mythology could meet Dalarna.
Biblical language could mingle with folk song.
Ancient goddesses could walk beside Swedish flowers.
Karlfeldt treated literary tradition as something living rather than something locked behind glass.
🏛️ Entering the Swedish Academy
In 1904, Karlfeldt was elected to the Swedish Academy, taking Seat 11.
The honor placed him within the institution founded in 1786 to promote Swedish language and literature.
By this point, the Academy also held a newer and increasingly influential responsibility: awarding the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Karlfeldt eventually became a member of the Nobel Committee and played an important role in the Academy’s literary activities.
His election is significant because he was no longer merely a successful poet writing about rural Sweden.
He had entered the center of Swedish literary authority.
That position created opportunity.
It also created the unusual ethical problem that would later surround his own Nobel candidacy.
🏅 The Nobel Problem
Karlfeldt’s name was proposed for the Nobel Prize in Literature multiple times during his lifetime.
The Nobel nomination archive records nominations across several years, including 1916, 1917, 1918, 1919, 1929, and 1931.
Yet awarding the prize to someone intimately involved in the institution selecting the winner presented an obvious difficulty.
The Swedish Academy records that Karlfeldt had previously been proposed as a recipient but refused to accept the prize while alive.
The decision was consistent with a certain reserve visible elsewhere in his public life.
Karlfeldt had become one of Sweden’s most respected poets, but he appears to have understood the uncomfortable appearance of receiving an award from an institution in which he himself held enormous influence.
The Nobel Prize would eventually come anyway.
Just not during his lifetime.
🗝️ Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy
After the death of Carl David af Wirsén in 1912, Karlfeldt was selected to become permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy. He formally took up the position at the beginning of 1913 and held it until his death.
His tenure was important in the Academy’s history.
Under his leadership, the institution became more receptive to newer literary voices that had previously faced resistance. Several important writers entered the Academy during this period.
Most significantly, in 1914 Selma Lagerlöf became the first woman elected to membership.
Karlfeldt personally contacted Lagerlöf about the election.
Her admission represented a major symbolic change for an institution that had remained exclusively male since its eighteenth-century founding.
The reform did not suddenly transform the Academy into a modern institution by contemporary standards, but Karlfeldt’s period as secretary marked a meaningful opening toward newer writers and a broader literary culture.
🌹 Selma Lagerlöf and a Changing Swedish Literature
Lagerlöf’s election also highlights an interesting contrast within Swedish literary history.
She had already become the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1909. Her novels drew from folklore, regional landscapes, storytelling traditions, history, and the Swedish countryside, though her fiction differed markedly from Karlfeldt’s poetry.
Both writers demonstrated that regional culture did not have to be provincial.
A writer could begin with a specific landscape and reach readers far beyond it.
That principle is essential to understanding Karlfeldt.
His poetry does not become universal by abandoning Dalarna.
It becomes universal by looking at Dalarna closely enough to uncover experiences that exist elsewhere too.
Home.
Desire.
Work.
Aging.
Seasonal change.
Memory.
Loss.
The human meaning of place.
🌼 Nature Without Simplicity
Karlfeldt is often described as a poet of nature and rural life, but those labels can make him sound simpler than he was.
His countryside is not merely peaceful.
Seasonal beauty carries the knowledge that seasons end.
Fertility exists beside decay.
Youth becomes age.
Desire becomes memory.
Harvest itself contains the fact that growing has stopped.
That awareness gives his poetry much of its emotional depth.
Karlfeldt loved the richness of the natural world, but he understood impermanence.
A blooming flower is beautiful partly because it will not remain.
A ripe fruit already contains the approach of autumn.
The year moves forward.
Human beings do too.
❤️ Love, Desire & the Seasons
Love poetry occupies an important place in Karlfeldt’s work.
Yet desire rarely exists in isolation from landscape.
People meet within fields, gardens, forests, villages, seasonal celebrations, and agricultural rhythms. The natural world becomes part of the emotional experience rather than a backdrop behind it.
This gives the poems a strongly physical quality.
Love belongs to bodies living within nature.
At the same time, Karlfeldt’s treatment of desire can contain distance, melancholy, humor, restraint, and awareness of time.
Romance does not necessarily defeat aging.
Passion does not stop autumn.
The tension between sensual pleasure and impermanence gives many poems their power.
Karlfeldt celebrates life without pretending it can be kept.
🔔 Flora and Bellona
Karlfeldt’s Flora och Bellona, published in 1918, appeared near the end of World War I.
The title brings together two Roman figures with dramatically different associations.
Flora represents flowers, growth, spring, and fertility.
Bellona is the goddess of war.
Placing them together creates a stark tension between life and destruction.
Sweden remained neutral during World War I, but neutrality did not make the conflict irrelevant. Europe had been devastated. Political systems collapsed. Millions were dead or wounded. Older assumptions about civilization and progress had been violently shaken.
Karlfeldt’s poetic world of flowers and seasons therefore existed beside the knowledge of modern warfare.
Nature continues growing even while human beings destroy one another.
That contrast gives the title an unsettling force.
🍂 The Horn of Autumn
Karlfeldt’s final major poetry collection, Hösthorn, or The Horn of Autumn, appeared in 1927.
The title is deeply appropriate for a poet who had spent decades using the seasons to think about human life.
Autumn is both abundance and ending.
It is harvest.
Color.
Ripeness.
Cooling air.
Shorter days.
Preparation for winter.
For an older poet, those associations naturally acquire additional resonance.
Karlfeldt was in his sixties when the collection appeared, and his poetry had accumulated the perspective of someone looking backward as well as outward.
The youthful energy of spring had not disappeared from his imaginative world, but autumn now carried its own beauty.
A mature life did not have to imitate youth to remain meaningful.
🎵 The Music of Swedish
One of the challenges in bringing Karlfeldt to English-speaking readers is that so much of his artistry depends upon Swedish itself.
Sound matters enormously in poetry.
Rhyme, rhythm, dialect, double meanings, cultural associations, older vocabulary, and echoes of traditional songs do not always cross languages intact.
Karlfeldt was particularly accomplished in his use of linguistic texture. He could move between elevated literary language and expressions rooted in rural speech.
That range helps explain why Swedish readers historically responded so strongly to his verse.
Translations can provide access to themes and imagery.
They cannot always recreate the exact pleasure of the original sound.
This may be one reason Karlfeldt remains less familiar internationally than some Nobel laureates whose work traveled more easily across languages.
🧑🌾 Regionalism Without Provincialism
Karlfeldt provides an excellent example of the difference between regionalism and provincialism.
A provincial writer may appear limited because the work assumes that a small world is the only world that matters.
A strong regional writer does something almost opposite.
The writer examines one place so deeply that it becomes a lens through which larger human experiences can be seen.
William Faulkner did this with Mississippi.
Thomas Hardy did it with Wessex.
Seamus Heaney repeatedly returned to Northern Irish landscapes and rural labor.
Karlfeldt did it with Dalarna.
The more specific the landscape becomes, the more real the emotional experience can feel.
A generalized countryside belongs nowhere.
A particular field can belong to everyone who has ever felt attached to a place.
🕰️ Tradition in a Modernizing Sweden
Karlfeldt lived during a period of enormous transformation in Sweden.
Industrialization accelerated.
Cities grew.
Agricultural society changed.
Political participation expanded.
Modern transportation altered distance.
Older village traditions increasingly existed beside new technologies and social structures.
His poetry therefore should not be read simply as a record of timeless rural Sweden.
The world he celebrated was changing even as he wrote about it.
That gives his regionalism an additional emotional dimension.
Preserving songs, expressions, landscapes, customs, and ways of seeing could become a response to modernization without necessarily becoming a rejection of the modern world.
Karlfeldt was not living in an isolated farm village.
He worked in Stockholm, libraries, academies, and international literary institutions.
He knew modernity firsthand.
Perhaps that is partly why the older world remained so powerful in his poems.
📜 Folklore, the Bible & Classical Myth
Karlfeldt drew from several overlapping traditions.
Swedish folklore provided one source.
Christian language and biblical imagery provided another.
Classical mythology gave him yet another symbolic vocabulary.
Rather than treating these traditions as separate systems, he often allowed them to inhabit the same poetic space.
A Swedish landscape might acquire classical associations.
A rural figure might echo something biblical.
A seasonal ritual might carry traces of older belief.
This layering makes the poetry richer than a simple pastoral celebration.
The countryside contains history.
Language contains earlier languages.
Traditions accumulate.
People may not always realize how many cultural layers exist beneath an apparently ordinary custom.
Karlfeldt did.
🕯️ Death in 1931
Erik Axel Karlfeldt died in Stockholm on April 8, 1931.
He was 66 years old.
His death ended nearly two decades of leadership at the Swedish Academy and more than three decades of major poetic publication.
The timing also created an extraordinary situation surrounding the Nobel Prize.
Karlfeldt had been nominated again for the 1931 literature prize, but he died months before the award was announced.
Later that year, the Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel Prize in Literature.
The official motivation was strikingly concise: the prize recognized “the poetry of Erik Axel Karlfeldt.”
For once, there was no attempt to identify a single book or literary principle.
The body of poetry itself was the achievement.
🏆 A Posthumous Nobel Prize
Karlfeldt’s 1931 award remains one of the unusual episodes in Nobel history.
Modern Nobel rules generally prevent prizes from being awarded to someone who has already died unless the person was alive when the award was announced. Karlfeldt’s prize came before that later restriction took its present form.
His posthumous selection therefore occupies a distinctive place in the history of the Nobel Prize in Literature.
The irony is difficult to miss.
While alive, Karlfeldt had reportedly declined to accept an award from the institution in which he held such a powerful position.
After his death, the Academy gave it to him anyway.
The prize transformed a poet deeply associated with Swedish language and regional tradition into an international Nobel laureate.
Yet the award could not solve the challenge that has always faced his international reputation.
Karlfeldt’s greatest instrument was Swedish itself.
🌍 Karlfeldt Beyond Sweden
English translations of Karlfeldt have never circulated as widely as translations of some other Scandinavian Nobel laureates.
A selection of his work appeared in English as Arcadia Borealis in 1938, translated by Charles Wharton Stork.
The title is revealing.
“Arcadia” evokes the idealized pastoral world of classical poetry.
“Borealis” points north.
Karlfeldt’s Dalarna could therefore be imagined as a northern Arcadia, a landscape in which rural life, love, nature, tradition, and poetry come together.
Yet Karlfeldt’s world is more complicated than pure pastoral idealization.
His seasons change.
People age.
Harvest follows flowering.
Winter waits beyond autumn.
The beauty of the landscape exists partly because time continually alters it.
📚 Why Karlfeldt Can Be Overlooked Today
Nobel recognition does not guarantee permanent international fame.
Some laureates become foundational figures in world literature.
Others remain especially important within their own languages.
Karlfeldt falls largely into the second category.
English-speaking readers may encounter his name through Nobel lists without encountering the poems themselves.
Translation is one reason.
Literary fashion is another.
Twentieth-century poetry increasingly moved toward modernism, fragmentation, urban experience, free verse, political crisis, and experimental forms. Karlfeldt’s deeply musical, traditional, rural poetry could appear connected to an older aesthetic even while it contained considerable sophistication.
But literary fashions change again.
The contemporary revival of interest in place, ecology, local culture, seasonal awareness, folk traditions, and relationships between humans and landscapes can make Karlfeldt surprisingly relevant.
🌱 Reading Karlfeldt in an Environmental Age
Karlfeldt was not an environmental poet in the contemporary political sense.
Applying that label directly would distort his historical context.
Yet his poetry possesses something modern readers increasingly value: sustained attention to the natural world.
He notices seasons.
Plants.
Weather.
Agricultural rhythms.
Human dependence upon the land.
The relationship between cultural traditions and particular landscapes.
This attentiveness stands in contrast with modern life in which food can appear disconnected from farming, seasons are softened by technology, and places increasingly resemble one another.
Karlfeldt’s poetry reminds readers that human cultures grow from environments.
Change the landscape, and cultural memory changes with it.
🎭 Fridolin’s Continuing Appeal
Fridolin remains one of Karlfeldt’s most useful literary inventions because he resists a choice modern culture often insists upon.
Is someone rural or educated?
Traditional or sophisticated?
Local or cosmopolitan?
Intellectual or practical?
Fridolin can be several things at once.
That complexity reflects Karlfeldt’s own life.
The boy from a Dalarna farming family eventually ran the Swedish Academy.
The poet of flowers and farm life participated in Nobel deliberations involving writers from around the world.
The university-trained intellectual kept returning imaginatively to folk speech and rural songs.
He did not have to abandon one world in order to enter another.
The poetry emerged from the conversation between them.
🏛️ Karlfeldt’s Institutional Legacy
Karlfeldt’s influence also extends beyond his poems.
His years as permanent secretary came during an important period in the development of the Swedish Academy.
The institution became more receptive to writers associated with newer literary movements, and Selma Lagerlöf’s 1914 election broke a barrier that had existed since the Academy’s founding.
Karlfeldt therefore belongs to two histories simultaneously.
He belongs to the history of Swedish poetry.
He also belongs to the history of the institution that would become internationally known above all for selecting the Nobel Prize in Literature.
That institutional role complicates his own Nobel story, but it also demonstrates how fully Karlfeldt participated in shaping Sweden’s literary culture.
He was not simply writing poems from the margins.
He stood close to the center.
🌟 Why Erik Axel Karlfeldt Still Matters
Erik Axel Karlfeldt matters because he demonstrates how much literary power can emerge from sustained attention to one place.
He did not need to abandon Dalarna in order to become important.
He needed to understand it deeply.
From its landscapes he drew poetry about desire, age, season, memory, pleasure, loss, work, culture, and time.
From its traditions he created a literary language capable of conversing with the Bible, classical mythology, Swedish folklore, and European poetry.
Through Fridolin, he created a figure who could move between education and rural identity without treating either as inferior.
And through decades of work with the Swedish Academy, Karlfeldt helped shape the literary institution that eventually awarded him its most internationally famous honor.
His writing can feel distant from the dominant traditions of English-language twentieth-century poetry, but that distance is precisely why rediscovering him can be worthwhile.
He gives readers another version of literary modernity—one in which progress does not require forgetting where one came from.
🎂 Erik Axel Karlfeldt: A Poet Rooted in Place
Born on July 20, 1864, Erik Axel Karlfeldt carried the landscapes of Dalarna from a farming community in central Sweden into the highest levels of Swedish literary life. He studied at Uppsala, taught, worked in major libraries, published poetry that transformed rural tradition into art, joined the Swedish Academy, participated in its Nobel work, and eventually became the institution’s permanent secretary.
Through collections such as Songs of the Wilderness and of Love, Fridolin’s Songs, Fridolin’s Pleasure Garden, Flora and Pomona, Flora and Bellona, and The Horn of Autumn, he built a poetic world governed by seasons. Spring could awaken desire, summer could ripen it, autumn could bring abundance and reflection, and winter could remind readers that nothing living remains unchanged.
His posthumous Nobel Prize gave that work an international distinction, but the prize is not the most interesting thing about him. Karlfeldt’s deeper achievement was proving that a poet could remain intensely rooted in one region without becoming confined by it.
Dalarna was his subject, but not his limit.
The farms, gardens, songs, flowers, forests, harvests, and traditions of his home became ways of writing about experiences far larger than a single province. Readers may come from other countries, speak other languages, and know entirely different landscapes, yet the deeper movement of the poems remains familiar. Seasons change. Places shape us. Youth passes. Memory grows stronger. Beauty is temporary precisely because life is temporary.
Karlfeldt spent a lifetime listening to those rhythms.
His poetry made them sing.
Virgin Mary
She comes down the meadows at Sjugareby.
She’s a little hill with almond flower skin,
yes, like almond blossoms and rose hips far away from the road and the village,
where it never dusts and hikes.
Which paths have you walked so that the sun did not burn you?
What have you dreamed, Maria, in your young breast and felt,
that your blood does not burn like the others?
It shines so wonderfully from your bare hair,
and thy forehead is as the bow of the moon,
when over Bergsängsbackar he walks white and sloping
and shines through the spring beats.
Now the evening wind is cooling in the columbine’s trust,
and yellow lily bells ring holiday and peace;
barely gnaws the hem of the pasture, barely breaks the kid of the hem,
it barely beeps in swallow nests and groves.
Now Dalarna’s boys and girls go pair by pair:
you are chosen above others, you are desired by one where,
what do you go so alone and ponder?
You are like a virgin, coming from her first communion table,
who wants to stay awake on the quiet night of Pentecost
with all the trembling of his heart and think of those words
she felt and those under her got to taste.
Turn around, turn around, Maria, now the evening is late.
Your mother may mourn that you are wandering so alone.
You are small and fragile like the crotch arrow branch,
and in the forest goes the striking bear.
Alas, the rose you hold is your sign and your care,
it is brought by an angel from a blessed herb garden:
you can step on snakes and thorns.
Yes, that ray, which is so shining and long
from the stronghold of the evening root over Lake Siljan–
you could go to paradise tonight your wedding
on the narrow and trembling tiljan.
-Erik Axel Karlfeldt
Jungfru Maria
Hon kommer utför ängarna vid Sjugareby.
Hon är en liten kulla med mandelblommans hy,
ja, som mandelblom och nyponblom långt bort från väg och by,
där aldrig det dammar och vandras.
Vilka stigar har du vankat, så att solen dig ej bränt?
Vad har du drömt, Maria, i ditt unga bröst och känt,
att ditt blod icke brinner som de andras?
Det skiner så förunderligt ifrån ditt bara hår,
och din panna är som bågiga månen,
när över Bergsängsbackar han vit och lutad går
och lyser genom vårliga slånen.
Nu svalkar aftonvinden i aklejornas lid,
och gula liljeklockor ringa helgsmål och frid;
knappt gnäggar hagens fåle, knappt bräker fållans kid,
knappt piper det i svalbon och lundar.
Nu gå Dalarnas ynglingar och flickor par om par:
du är utvald framför andra, du är önskad av en var,
vad går du så ensam och begrundar?
Du är som jungfrun, kommen från sitt första nattvardsbord,
som i den tysta pingstnatt vill vaka
med all sitt hjärtas bävan och tänka på de ord
hon förnummit och de under hon fått smaka.
Vänd om, vänd om, Maria, nu blir aftonen sen.
Din moder månde sörja, att du strövar så allen.
Du är liten och bräcklig som knäckepilens gren,
och i skogen går den slående björnen.
Ack, den rosen, som du håller, är ditt tecken och din vård,
den är bringad av en ängel från en salig örtagård:
du kan trampa på ormar och törnen.
Ja, den strålen, som ligger så blänkande och lång
ifrån aftonrodnans fäste över Siljan–
du kunde gå till paradis i kväll din brudegång
på den smala och skälvande tiljan.
-Erik Axel Karlfeldt
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