Karin Boye and the Courage to Break Open

There are poems you can no longer quote without hearing them recited back in chorus. ”Yes, of course it hurts when buds are breaking” is one such poem. It has wandered out of Karin Boye's collection ”For the Tree's Sake” (1935) and into eulogies, graduation speeches, therapy rooms and Instagram feeds. And yet – every time you really read it, not just quote it, something happens.

It is the poem of change, not of spring. It is the poem of everything we must let go in order to grow. And it is a poem written by a woman who herself knew what it costs to break – not theoretically, not symbolically, but with her whole existence at stake.

An upbringing between strictness and longing

Karin Boye was born in 1900 in Gothenburg, the eldest child of a bourgeois family marked by her father's illness and her mother's strong religious leanings. Early on she became a girl who read whatever came to hand: the Bible, the Buddha, Plato. Religion was not a shell that fell away in adolescence. It was a room she refused to leave without first having tried to understand it.

She studied in Uppsala, joined the radical Clarté movement, took part in the socialist and pacifist 1920s. But she was never an orthodox ideologue. There was always a longing in her for something beyond the political, something politics could not promise and yet must not deny: the categories of the soul itself, of the dream, of the body.

Background: a writer in crisis

When Boye wrote ”For the Tree's Sake” she was in the middle of a tumultuous period. She had left her marriage to the writer Leif Björck, come out to herself as a lesbian, broken from Sweden to undergo analysis in Berlin during the dramatic year 1932–33, and returned to a country where the openness she longed for did not exist. Behind the poem about the buds lies a very concrete experience of tearing oneself loose from one's own former life.

That is what makes the lines so strong. They do not have the abstract prettiness of an aphorism. They have the physical clarity that only comes from the experience of having oneself broken, out of a shell one had believed to be one's identity. Boye knew that skin can split. She knew there are ways of living that kill slowly, and that leaving them can feel like dying quickly.

A poem with two voices

“Yes, of course it hurts when buds are breaking. / Why else would spring hesitate? / Why else would all our ardent longing / be bound in the frozen bitter pale?”

The first voice is defiant, almost rhetorical. It poses questions that wait for no answer. The second voice – which takes over in the poem's later stanzas – is softer, a kind of motherly consolation directed both outward and inward. Between them moves the whole drama of the poem: the pain is acknowledged but not transformed away. It is allowed to be, but it is not allowed to decide everything.

It is a lyric technique that many modern self-help books have tried to imitate without success. Boye holds two truths in the same hand: yes, it hurts, and yes, it is still worth it. Not as consolation, but as reality. And there is no empty encouragement here. She does not say it will get better. She says that broken things belong in life.

The discipline of form

It is easy to forget that Boye was a tremendously disciplined formal poet. ”Yes, of course it hurts” stands in fixed stanzaic meter, with cross rhymes and a regular beat. She was not a modernist who blew up the forms. She was a modernist who used the forms against themselves – filled the traditional vessels with an entirely new kind of liquid.

Her experiments in free verse were sparing and not always successful. It was within the strict form that she became free. That is something to keep in mind in an age when freedom is often misunderstood as the absence of rules. Sometimes the rule is precisely what lets you say what you would not otherwise dare to say.

Why it has survived

Many poems from Swedish 1930s modernism have faded. Boye's have not. One explanation is the language – her Swedish is still easy to breathe in, free of the period's mannerisms. Another is the theme. Change, pain and necessary farewell are not experiences bound to an epoch. They are the foundations of life.

But there is also a third explanation, less often mentioned: the poem is generous. It leaves room for the reader to fill it with her own. The bud that breaks may be a relationship, a professional identity, a political conviction, an aging body, a changing nation. Boye does not dictate what the pain is. She only says that it belongs there.

More than one poem

It is a pity that Boye is so often reduced to this one text. Her novels ”Crisis” (1934) and above all ”Kallocain” (1940) belong to the most important Swedish 20th-century literature. ”Kallocain” – a dark dystopia about a totalitarian future state where a truth drug forces citizens to reveal their innermost thoughts – was written alongside the rise of Nazi Germany and the Soviet show trials. It is, many feel, still unsurpassed as a Swedish dystopia.

And in her other lyric work – the collections ”Clouds” (1922), ”Hidden Lands” (1924), ”The Hearths” (1927), ”For the Tree's Sake” (1935) – there is a darker, more politically alert poetry that is often forgotten. Here are poems about labor, about the collective, about the hope of another world, but also the slowly ripening insight that change may never come by that road.

Boye the translator

Fewer people know that Boye was also one of her age's most important translators. She translated T.S. Eliot's ”The Waste Land” into Swedish – a deed that alone would have sufficed to write her into literary history. Her translation is not uncontested, but it has a sensitivity to Eliot's musicality that few successors have surpassed.

To translate is to live close to another language's breathing. For Boye it was probably a way of widening her own. Her own poems have an international shading that is not accidental: she had read, listened, translated.

The end

She took her own life in April 1941, forty years old, on a stony point near Alingsås. Shortly before, she had finished ”Kallocain”. The biographical tragedy does not make the poem less true. It makes it, if anything, even more courageous. She knew what she was speaking of when she wrote about the pain of breaking. She also knew what she was speaking of when, in her last poems, she wrote about daybreak and ascent.

To read Boye biographically – as a tragic fate – is understandable but reductive. She was not her fate. She was her writing, and her writing is more expansive than her life. She had time to formulate what many after her have needed to hear: that pain is not a misfortune that can be avoided, but a part of growing itself.

Reading Boye today

We live in an age that seems to expect pain to be optimized away. Boye reminds us of something else: that certain kinds of pain are the very motion of transformation. To refuse to break is to refuse to grow. It is an uncomfortable insight, and it does not become less uncomfortable for being well-known.

Her political acuity is also strikingly current. ”Kallocain” is read today in a time when surveillance, data collection and state manipulation of the truth are once again pressing questions. That she saw this so early, and described it with such lyric precision, is one of the few examples of Swedish literature actually being, on occasion, prophetic.

Read her slowly. Read her aloud. And linger a couple of minutes before moving on. The buds need time. It is not a metaphor. It is the poem's own instruction.