Ex. 13-11: Og jeg vil drage fra Sydens Blommer

A simple song that Carl Nielsen wrote around 1914 for Melodier til Johan Borups Sangbog (Melodies for Johan Borup's Songbook), a collection of songs meant for ordinary people to sing. The words are by the Danish poet Holger Drachmann (1846–1908), from his 1877 work Tannhäuser.

In the poem, he is leaving the warm South without taking either its flowers or its thorns. He turns back toward the North, his cold homeland, and sends his song ahead of him, to where the linden tree gives shelter from the rain. Nielsen marked the melody to be sung "with a longing motion" (Med længselsfuld Bevægelse).

1914 was one of the hardest years of Nielsen's life. His marriage to the sculptor Anne Marie was breaking apart, and the couple began to live separately. At the same time he was writing his huge, stormy Symphony No. 4, The Inextinguishable, as the First World War broke out. He wrote this quiet song about going home in the same year his own home was falling apart.

Even while working on that massive symphony, Nielsen deliberately wrote very simple, singable songs that anyone could join in. In 1915, with the organist Thomas Laub, he published En snes danske viser (A Score of Danish Songs), which helped start a wave of communal singing across Denmark.

The poet Drachmann was a friend of Edvard Grieg, who set several of his poems and once went on a long mountain walking tour with him. The same poem had already been set to music in 1880 by the Swedish composer Emil Sjögren.

From the album Songs by Carl Nielsen and His Pupils by Lars Thodberg Bertelsen and Tøve Ronschow (2007)
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