No Blond Skies
There is clearly a Norway of the imagination. An attentive reader, having seen my note on Emily Dickinson last week, sent me this supremely melancholy poem by the symbolist Émile Nelligan, who says of himself in a moment of near despair: ‘I am the new Norway from which the blond skies have departed’. Nelligan is a tragic figure in the literature of Québec. Afflicted with a bipolar condition he was hospitalised at the age of twenty and remained in institutions until his death at 44. He seems not to have known the soft luminosity that marks even the depths of Norwegian winter – not to mention the summer nights untouched by any darkness at all.
