THUS SAUNTER WE SO GRADUALLY: BELLMAN'S DANSE MACABRE
The following essay is a translation by Yours Truly of both the song and its analysis by Carl Fehrman. -
In 1787, the year the author's second-born Elias Bellman died, the latest edition released of Fredman's Songs added the lyrics where once more the symbolic worlds of hourglass and drinking glass collide; ie the grand Fredman's Song number 21. In an afterthought on hourglasses and drinking glasses, these lyrics must of course be the core text.
The psychological complexity of the Bellman characters, that often and rightfully has been questioned, is at least in this case consequent. Here he is the usual philosopher of wines and vanities:
Thus saunter we so gradually
from revels loud and bountiful,
when Death comes calling: "Come to me,
thy hourglass is full!"
You, elder, lower your bâton,
and you, young man, my law partake:
The fairest nymph who smiles at you on
in your arms you shall take!
REFRAIN:
If you think the grave's too deep and dire,
why not take a draught of liquid fire?
Then another, a third, make it four, make it five...
and you'll feel more alive!
The original title itself is "Mealtime Song." Sondén has added a subtitle like those of the Bellman Epistles: "During the feast, in which the author places Death before the eyes of the guests." In image after image, the lyrics present the stark contrast between the revels loud and bountiful of life and the deep darkness of the grave. Death comes calling: "Come to me, thy hourglass is full!" In older vanitas literature it has often been said that one's "hourglass has run out," and Bellman had used this crystallized fixed expression both before and after Song 21, both as narrator and having his characters utter it. In Song 21, "Thus Saunter We So Gradually," the words are not said, however, by any mortal person, but by Death. The Reaper himself, gaze fixed on the lower half of the hourglass, is the one to give the verdict, maybe with an ironic innuendo-thought that the narrator himself had generally preferred full glasses to empty ones.
"Thus Saunter We So Gradually" holds a unique place not only in Bellman's production, but also in literary genre history. It is Bellman's Dionysian take on the ancient death-dance or danse macabre motif. The medieval visual and literary convention of Death meeting people of diverse ages and ranks was still alive in the printed penny dreadfuls of the eighteenth century, during whose second half two different danses macabres were released in penny dreadful format in Swedish. The first one is a translation from the Danish (intermediate translation) of the originally German Natanael Schlott's modernised version of the traditional lyrics to the classic Lübecker Totentanz. It was released in Swedish, with a title that translates to Conversations Between Death and People of Diverse Ranks, in between 1760 and 1850. The second, released in between 1777 and 1858, was translated directly from the Danish; known from its publisher and illustrator as the Borup Death-Dance, its much longer official title being The Vanity of Human Life, or Conversations Between Death and People of All Ranks. In the last of these two penny dreadfuls, a whole little booklet with 38 woodcuts, the old parade of ranks has been expanded and diversified, adapted to eighteenth-century Scandinavian society. But the Reaper is still skeletal in black hood, and has not changed his ways the least since the days of the Black Death. He bows low before the queen and kisses her hand, he plays the cello for the music teacher, he defeats the fencing teacher in a swordfight with rapiers, he takes all the money from the innkeeper, and so forth, until he snatches the crutches from the old beggar.
The hourglass is a commonplace emblem in this danse macabre: the Reaper holds it often in his right hand to his victim, whenever his hands are not already busy.
Bellman must have known the danse macabre in one or another of its eighteenth-century iterations; it was also frequently depicted on coffins at the close of the century, in serially produced printings from the renowned Lundström printing press of Jönköping. In previous lyrics, Bellman had already directly represented the death-dance scenario when, in his musical world, he made Death strike a tune:
Around all what you see, where'er you take a glance,
the Reaper's silently ambushed to play a tune, to dance.
But Bellman's own grand variation on the danse macabre, "Thus Saunter We So Gradually," is more than a pale echo of these lines. It is a Dionysian paraphrase of an originally religious and moral motif. You may go the extra mile and say that Bellman, that great master of literary and musical parody, has written a travesty of a danse macabre. Memento mori, look at the time on the hourglass, was and is the message both ostensible and latent of traditional danse macabre. Memento bibere, memento vivere, carpe diem, let me the canakin clink, is the content of the Bellman-style death-dance. Fredman's Song 21 is more than just a parade of vanities; it is also an elegant mealtime song, which ends in a charming skål for the hostess.
How does Bellman do when he translates the danse macabre parade into his Dionysian lyrics, and which characters does he present in the stanzas in quick cavalcade? Right from the start, he has left the conversational-dramatic pattern of the real danse macabre genre, where Death shows up before each and every person with the command to follow, and gives the living a chance to reply. Bellman's lyrics are however more of a soliloquy, and the speaker, at least in the first stanza, partially also in the others, is supposed to be the Reaper himself, who in an old-fashioned way comes calling: "Come to me!" However, the singer who performed this roll-call or dramatis-personae song in real life was the author, C.M. Bellman. This complicated metafictional situation lets, as the lyrics unfurl, to add glissandos into each and every stanza.
In turn, the narrator turns to each and every of the different representatives of professions or character types, as if that person were literally present in the room. This gives the poem dramatic concretion. But one should pay heed to the fact that Bellman not only adds people from the catalogues of ranks of the medieval or Rococo danses macabres, but also a list of more actual character types. After the elder, the young man, and the nymph, who represent the ages of life (old age, youth, and midlife at least), the ones who come the closest are the Dionysian votary (the lush) and thereafter the braggart with his chest full of medals:
You, th'one with apple-ruddy cheeks
and tricorn hat cocked to the side,
soon your procession dressed in black
is forward seen to stride!
And you, who speak of poppycocks,
with medals rife your overcoat...
I hear carpenters make your box
and rattle in your throat!
REFRAIN:
If you think the grave's too deep and dire... etc.
The ruddy face is one of the emblematic attributes in the Bellman world. The gentleman in the cocked hat in Song 21 is best understood as the innkeeper or restaurant owner himself. Right after him, Bellman names the great braggart, actualized in the theatre of that decade, the bombastic noble-blooded courtier or politician; Bellman is not as ordered in the list of ranks as the authors of real danse macabre. But his skill for concretion is admirable: he presents impending death in vivid symbolic images, ie the funeral procession and the carpenters making the coffin.
More of the stock character types of eighteenth-century theatrical comedy does Bellman replace the old parade of ranks with in his own character gallery. We have already mentioned the bombastic braggart; well, the lazy people-hater is another. And, by the side of the people-hater full of laziness, we find another actual type of the inflationary Gustavian Stockholm, the decadent aristocrat:
And you, who, chanting titles' clank,
deck your bâton with gold each year,
which barely gets, for all your rank,
a shilling for your bier!
And you, who, cowardly and irate,
curse the cradle that once you held,
yet, at the glass's second half, they relate,
each day by strong drink felled!
REFRAIN:
If you think the grave's too deep and dire, etc.
It is a fresh and elegant move made by Bellman to renew the old cast of characters in the danse macabre, which had partially lost its staying power in the society of his days, by adding the character types of comedic drama and satire. For him and for his era, these character types were as living as the personality type schemes (Myers-Briggs, Enneagram, the zodiac...) of our days. Boileau in his fourth satire, Molière in his comedies, even Shakespeare had all taken up their casts from Plautine comedy and commedia dell'arte, from which these character types all descend.
But Bellman has not completely left the old pattern of danse macabre. Here the warrior is present, as well as the lover and the scholar:
You, who in blood-stained shirt forth strode
whenever Ares played fanfare,
you, who in the arms of Fräulein Bode
are weak and toss and flare...
...and you, with books inlaid with gold,
raising your head at church-bells' knell,
clever and learned, to wage war told
on ignorance and hell!
REFRAIN:
If you think the grave's too deep and dire, etc.
Also here these that Bellman present are more types than individuals; the whole song constantly gives beautiful proof of his typifying human depictions, as Afzelius so finely characterized this in Myt och Bild (Myth and Picture).
At the end of the poem, the parade of both types and ranks disappears out of sight, and the character of the lyrics to a merry party song surfaces through and through. The old convention in drinking songs of offending and slandering the killjoys who won't partake in the revels is something that Bellman has variated with mastery:
But you, who as if honest shine,
offending your friends constantly,
and slandering them once drunk wine,
as if a joke, I see...
And you, your friends do you not defend,
in spite of all the drinks you've shared...
You could as well stick a carrot up your rear end!
What d'you say? Have you cared?
REFRAIN:
If you think the grave's too deep and dire, etc.
But you, upon returning, the most
times French leave took! What did you think?
Not pleased at all is our dashing host,
though he commanded: "Drink!"
Tear such a guest apart from the feast,
thrust him out with his whole entourage,
then, with a mien of fiend or beast,
tear the cup from his visage!
REFRAIN:
If you think the grave's too deep and dire, etc.
Death had called: "Come to me!" The host commands now: "Drink!" Both give commands that must not be questioned. Not returning a toast was then seen as a particularly offensive insult, a token of hate itself.
In the Bellman song, this stanza, the second from the end, has a special function. It links associations in a new direction: it revolves around courtesy towards the hosts. And the coda is written as a speech of gratitude from the guests to the hosts, especially the hostess; thus, the character of the lyrics as drinking song with friends at a celebration table is guaranteed:
Say, are you pleased? What do you say?
Then praise the host now at the end all!
If we're all heading the same way,
we'll follow each other! Skål!
But first, with our wines red and white,
we bow before our hostess! Arr!
Slip freely into the grave in the light
of Venus, th'evening star!
REFRAIN:
If you think the grave's too deep and dire,
why not take a draught of liquid fire?
Then another, a third, make it four, make it five...
and you'll feel more alive!
This is one of the most whimsical stanzas, where Bellman moves across different levels simultaneously. If the guests are all heading the same way, they usually follow each other; this is the shallow, ostensible meaning of the third and fourth verses. In vanity literature and sacred texts, it is also spoken of that same way that everyone has to go; ie towards the afterlife. This innuendo gives the words their double meaning.
Venus, the evening star, has begun to shine; this element of nature is both literal and symbolic. Of the path "from tavern to grave" underneath the starry skies has Bellman spoken quite often, including in the parody instructions for his own funeral, but seldom with such a carefree phrase as "slip freely into the grave!" Dead drunk, many of Bellman's Dionysian knights had reeled; this grave is deep and dire... of the "dark dire deep" of both intoxication and death he had earlier spoken. Dying in peace was the traditional wisdom of the sacred texts. Dying and feeling alive is Bellman's Dionysian and whimsical variation on the religious wisdom of preparing for death.
In spite of this last stanza tying into the previous ones and carrying through the song's twin themes of death and drinking, it has overall a merry and whimsical character, as does this simultaneously pleasant and tragicomic deathly promenade polonaise, sung to the tune of Naumann's March from Kellgren's opera Gustaf Vasa.
Bellman has also used the same tune twice more; interestingly, both other times in drinking songs, both of them also written around 1787.
Hourglass and drinking glass; one could at last see these symbols as emblems of two poles in Bellman's personality. The hourglass stands for melancholy, gravity, and sadness; the drinking glass for the excessive elation, for the Dionysian ecstasy.
PS. Interestingly, I had already put it into words that this is a danse macabre:
One of the Åkerström covers of Bellman that have struck me, and many a Swede, to the core is his rendition of Fredman's Song number 21, one of the finest in said compilation.
There are no proper names said in the lyrics of this song, because the ensemble cast of guests at this death-dance of a feast consists of archetypal stock characters: the womaniser, the warrior, the scholar, the upstart, the very important person, the wicked friend whose jokes prove painful... People that, in both Gustavian Sweden and in the present day, anyone may recognise from both their day-to-daily life and fictional universes (compare the cast of the Wizarding World or A Song of Ice and Fire or Les Misérables or the CLAMP shared universe, not to mention every Shakespearean tragedy!). And the master of ceremonies is the Grim Reaper himself, driving home the point of death as the Great Equaliser (or, to say it in Valyrian, "valar morghulis"). All people must die, no matter their rank, their ideas, or their personality. Yet there for all the valar morghulis in the fate of the guests in the stanzas, the refrain and the final stanza, aside from the chipper tune, give a bright counterpoint of carpe diem, or hakuna matata. Yes, all of us must die; so why not make the most of the lives we have left, drink and be merry, enjoy, live as if each and every day could be our last? That is a definitely Enlightenment, Epicurean, and optimistic solution to the existential concerns about mortality and the dark side of reality. A solution that Yours Truly supports with all her heart and soul, and what better way to hammer it home than in the lyrics of a drinking song? This Bellman song could as well have been Iago's "Let me the canakin clink clink," if Iago were a more creative, sensitive person, and if he at least had more time to sing something longer and more complex than a simple limerick.
