His poetic rapture lasted for several weeks. It was a wonderful joy at last to be able to pour it forth, to reveal himself, to shout out all he felt, to take revenge on all the thousand impressions that had weighed him down to earth with their luxuriant wealth.
When Tord was not writing he wandered about with staring eyes and careful, groping steps, as if he were fragile and afraid to fall to pieces. If Dagmar spoke to him he told her to shut up, though in an anxious, almost gentle voice.
Tord had already filled a tremendous packet of notepaper when his imagination suddenly dried up one long, gloomy, wet day. He sat down to copy it out, but he had some difficulty in finding the way in the maze of his own inspiration. What did they really mean, all those strange figures resembling a barometric curve during a storm or the seismograph record registering an earthquake? Certain after-echoes of his inspiration and an infinite reverence for his own Selambian genius helped him, however, over the worst. Only here and there a brief humdrum phrase crept in to make it more intelligible and as a sacrifice to the philistines.
On an absolutely still, sultry day in July, with distant thunder in the air, Tord copied out with trembling hand the last line of his poem. Then he rushed out into the kitchen and tore Dagmar away from the stove, where she stood in her chemise and an underskirt with her pipe in the corner of her mouth, cooking sausage for supper. He trailed her with him into the bedroom, forced her into a chair, pulled down the blind, and began to read.
It was unrhymed verse, of course, in the shortest possible lines, abrupt sentences and inarticulate phrases. A collection of exclamations, questions, curses, shouts of jubilation, all expressive of Tord Selamb’s relation to woman, the clouds, the sea, the lightning and the eagles.
Tord read with a hoarse, trembling voice. He seemed to whisper the most extraordinary secrets of his life with a wild emotion. And still, had he not, in the presence of the uninitiated, been seized already at the very first line by a terrible doubt? Was this ... was this really poetry? He looked at his wife above the sheets of papers with the eyes of a beggar, but of a mad beggar beseeching prostrate adoration.