Black Crosses - On death row
		Sorrow can be a heavy burden, yet easy to put down. In his poem “Black Crosses”, Olav H. Hauge stages how death liberates man from suffering. The imagery is pure, rhythmic and dark. It may evoke the gothic, or gloomy rock music.
		by Jens Wabø, Mic Media translated by Mari Skjerdal Lysne
		When reading a complete authorship, our findings will surely be marked by our mode of reading and what we are searching for. We can present interpretations of supposed literary strategies, outline the author’s different projects or examine the authorship in light of intricate theoretical positions. These readings may be useful, but we need not be restricted to the academic in order to distinguish important aspects in a literary work. The immediate and the complex complement each other.
		How he sees nature
		Such a divided reading may well be applied to Olav H. Hauge’s authorship. There is no need to shift into an academic gear in order to understand what is at stake in his poems. Hauge himself was well read within the literary field, but still he refused to comment publicly on his own poetry: he believed it would lead to an unnecessary theorization of his writing. He was no stranger to terms like anthropomorphism, but still emphasized that he saw more in nature than rhetorics: when writing like he did, it was because he actually felt that nature had soul.
		Sorrow and the loss of meaning Sorrow and suffering are essential elements in Hauge’s poetry. It is present at all times, weighing down as well as lifting up, hopelessness combined with an anticipated redemption. These are emotions often associated with negative experiences and a feeling of not being able to see a larger whole behind the small things. And a person searching for larger truths will often experience the greatest sorrows, because existence is not made to fit into grand schemes. Negative experiences are greatly represented in Hauge’s poetry, but they are not the final destination for the poetic self. The sorrow is heavy, and sometimes even paralysing, but the author brings a movement to the poems where these depressing emotions appear. The motion is often a method to create a liberating distance from the experience of sorrow: “You let your sorrow go, and the wind took it away.”[1] Even though the subject is left standing on the beach while everything else turns away and leaves man in an almost total desolation – distanced from other people, the world and maybe even the language and the poetry – the experience of loss sets off something else. This is often done through metaphors marked by movement and the possibility of something new arising. In this way, Hauge’s modernism is not distanced from dreaming and inner longing. He is situated between several extreme positions.
		Pretty simple The idea of suffering as something that man can outdistance by a movement in space was present already in Hauge’s first books. This becomes especially clear if we allow ourselves to read the author’s own comments on the compact poem “Black Crosses.” Let us first read the poem, so we have it clearly in mind:   Black Crosses Black crosses in white snow stooped in rain, awry. Here came the dead over the thorny moor with their crosses over their shoulders and laid them by and went to rest under each icy tussock. (Translation by Robin Fulton, published in Leaf-huts and Snow-houses (2003) London: Anvil Press Poetry)
		The poet’s perspective To use the poet’s own intensions as a departure point for reading, may be a dubious affair. The text always has a life of its own. But it may also provide us with perspectives that otherwise might have been overlooked. In the case of this poem, I feel that the distance between what is expressed in the poem and Hauge’s own motivation for writing it is adding to the possible interpretations. Hauge’s own interpretation (and he is aware of it being his own understanding of the poem) focuses on an emotional aspect of a text that is, seemingly, stripped for feelings. The combination of the pure, simple image and the symbolic treatment of the liberation from suffering is almost gothic in its emphasized and clear darkness, where rain, snow and crosses appear together. The dead come walking, they move – come walking with their sorrow, and as such they are used as a rhetorical figure or personification. Life and death mirror each other. The dead come walking and lay their suffering down, before they go to rest. Hauge animates the inanimate, what is already dead and buried. In this way, even the unmoving sheds a cold light on our lives. Death in this poem is suddenly our own death, as if death is already here. Concrete, naked. Rhythmic, precise, subdued.[2] One of the interesting points about this text is that, while published in a collection alongside poems reflecting a romantic style of writing, it stands out from the rest of the poems and draws and image sharp as a woodcut of the dead marching into the graveyard. For the reader, it may seem like this is nothing but a sober description, but for Hauge the poem has its basis in human suffering. He says the following: “The cross, it is a symbol of what you carry, the suffering, you know – what you have to carry in this world. And they lay it down there. It is pretty simple.”[3] Post mortem The poem is concentrated, static and ends in a finished movement. At the same time it is written from a future point of view, or post mortem. It brings new movement to the unmoving, and transforms and exceeds the limitations of reality. Hauge creates a moving image of how the dead have walked there, perhaps together, like a long file of doomed on their way to the final rest. The poet is absent, like the absence resting over empty space where no one is looking. The poem’s pure descriptions also invite the reader to respond. We are not bound by the poet’s own interpretation. For me, the text evokes musical images. When I read the poem “Black Crosses”, I think of heavy music with dark guitar solos, or maybe the gloomy Canadian apocalyptic band Godspeed You Black Emperor. They could have good use of Hauge – I have missed good lyrics to their melodies. And the young Hauge, he could have delivered lyrics! This poem is pure and naked, and it could handle an accompanying melody, to come forward in its plenty, its drama and its calm.
		Photo
		1. Illustration. Overgrown cemtary in Central City, Colorado. (Photo: Ray Roper, iStockphoto)
		Jens Wabø
		Born 1972, lives in Oslo. Wrote his master's thesis on the poetry of Olav H. Hauge. Editor of Substrat Journal. jenswabo (at) yahoo.no
		Sources
		Olav H. Hauge, Dikt i samling, Det norske Samlaget, Oslo 1994. Jan Erik Vold, Under Hauges ord, Det norske Samlaget, Oslo 1994.
		Noter
		[1] Hauge 1994, s. 154. [2] Op. cit., s. 20. [3] Vold 1994, s. 118