The English poet John Keats (1795-1821) wrote a long and well-known poem called "Ode on a Grecian Urn". In the 1900's another Englishman, Desmond Skirrow (1924-1976), advertising executive and writer of thrillers, composed the elegant "Ode on a Grecian Urn summarized", practically defining what I mean by "Short Poems".

Some will say, perhaps, that writing short poems is a rather un-Norwegian tradition. Long and grave poems dominates it, they say, and probably remember the ground school reader. Bur as a matter of fact Norwegian literature contains many poems of the short type with a twinkle in the eye. True, the best poems were written in the 1700's. It's a pity that the works of Johan Herman Wessel (1742-1785) are almost untranslatable.

The short poems of Johan Herman Wessel may be called epigrams. Many of them have found a place in our language as "sayings", and most people are probably unaware of the origin of the two poems at right. By the way, they show that distance and irony often is found in Wessels short verses.

The American Ogden Nash (1902-1971) wrote numerous short and humoristic poems, that was his speciality. The verses at left are typical for him. The first is one of his best, compact and with snappy rhymes. Number two is funny, but could have been even shorter - and better. Try reading it without the last line! The last verse shows a theme that Ogden Nash used many times: He often wrote about animals.

The Norwegian Arvid Hanssen (1932-1998) from the island Senja wrote several novels and many collections of poetry. Especially among his poems we find many instances of top quality North-Norwegian humour, as in the poem "Boat and wife".

Perhaps Arvid Hanssens poem, "At our places", isn't that short if tou count lines, but it is tightly composed in few words, almost as a nursery rhyme. Besides that it is a magnificent example of typical Northern Norwegian "gallows humor", but without being self-pitying or backward-looking. And the punch line is just as surprising as a real laughter trigger should be. A little service for readers without knowledge about Norwegian: Arvid Hanssen names three times three North Norwegian fiords ("i" means "in", "og" means "and"). For every group he asks "Would you believe -", and in the last line adds "such stones!" (sorry, the rhyme got lost in my translation ...).

The American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) mostly wrote about everyday things, often in a sentimental style. This verse isn't sentimental, it is funny, period, due to the surprising rhyme (forehead/horrid) and because it paints a portrait of a little home tyrant.

I've tried to translate Longfellow, but to make it short and painful: The result is far below the original. No, it is difficult to lift a short poem into another language.

This wellknown Norwegian short poem tells the story about a bully and his victim. No sympathy for the victim, sad to say, but that's not the point. The story is a little drama, told in a compact and rhytmic form. A short poem, by any measure.