"The Swedish Texans"
Larry E. Scott
1st Edition Copyright 1990
The University of Texas
Institute of Texan Cultures at San Antonio

Mathilde's verse is typical of much immigrant poetry. There are some nature poems, a number of sentimental works about the Old Country, childhood memories, and Christmas, and quite a few religious poems about her conversion and subsequent joy. Some attempts at the Varmland dialect she used later in life are humorous, and there are even a few poems in Norwegian, the language of her earliest childhood. But a few of her Swedish poems reveal the profound effect the the immensity of the American, and specifically the Texan, landscape made on her European sensibilities. The restless currents of America's mightiest port are ween as an awesome but also something to be feared in

"New York"

Rumbling, constantly bustling,
Like the mighty river you hasten
Forward at an unchecked speed,
Never is there a moment of rest;
Carrying everything that you meet
with you in a roaring eddy
You are mighty in your restlessness
But you are also terrible and grim.

And, in a poem like "Hemlangtan", the strangeness and danger lurking in the untamed Texas wilderness -- much like the energy of New York -- cause her to think fondly of the safe homeland that she and so many others have left behind forever:

Indeed the heavens' tent here spreads itself
more deep blue
Over forest and valley with sap-filled
luxuriant green
And indeed the thousands of fields of
flowers attain
A richness of color more beautiful than
one could wish for.
But, alas! invisible dust, a poisonous seed
of disease,
Flies from here on the summer wind from the
fields of flowers
And, under the reddest rose, like the whitest
lily's snow,
The tarantula lurks, hidden, and the
poisonous rattlesnake crawls.