Nocturne

I drive through a village at night, houses step forward 

into the headlight glare – they are awake, they want a drink.

Houses, barns, signboards, abandoned vehicles – now

they come to Life. – People are sleeping:

some can sleep peacefully, others have strained faces

as if in hard training for eternity.

They don’t dare to let go, even in deep sleep.

They rest like lowered barriers when mystery passes by.

From the village the road continues a long time through forest trees.

And trees trees are silent in unison with each other.

They have a theatrical colour that exists in firelight.

How distinct each leaf is! They follow me all the way home. 

I’m lying down and going to sleep, I see unfamiliar images

and signs scrawling themselves behind my eyelids

On the wall of darkness. A large letter tries in vain to force itself

into the slot between wakefulness and dream.

Tomas Tranströmer

Translated by John Cobley

This poem was published in The Half-Finished Heaven (1962). It is an early poem, written when Tranströmer was about 30. 

The initial challenge here is to integrate the second stanza into the poem’s meaning. Why does he deviate from his night-time drive for a whole stanza to talk about sleep? The answer comes in the fourth stanza where he again discusses sleep. 

So the basic structure of the poems is driving in stanzas 1 and 3, and sleep in stanzas 2 and 4. In the driving stanzas the poet shows how closely he identifies with what he sees vividly in the “headlight glare.” Indeed for him the village and the forest come alive. Sandwiched between these two stanzas is a description of how ordinary people sleep: “they don’t dare let go.”

The final stanza explains how the poet sleeps. He enters a magical world “between wakefulness and dream” in order to create “unfamiliar images and signs.” This world, where many poets have found creativity, was explored by Freud and captured brilliantly by Pushkin in his poem “Autumn.”

But there is a final twist to the poem. Whatever the poet finds comes to nought. The “large letter” can’t be mailed—or received. We are left to consider this failure.