Den danske sang - Jens Vejmand

Carl Nielsen wrote music for many Danish poems.
Here is one of the most famous of them:

Jens Roadman

Who’s sitting by the shelter

with hands where rags do cling,

with eye-patch made of leather

and shoes held on with string?

It’s no one but Jens Roadman

who must, shall he be fed,

transform with his own hammer

the hard stones into bread.

And should you wake one morning

as dawn begins to soar

and hear a hammer clanging

once more, once more, once more,

It’s no one but Jens Roadman

on old legs once so true

who sends wild sparks a-flying

from stones now wet with dew.

And should you travel townwards

behind the farmer’s mares,

and pass beside an old man

eyes watering with tears –

It’s no one but Jens Roadman,

straw-clad round legs and knees,

who seeks in vain for shelter

so he won’t have to freeze.

And should you journey homewards

while showers and gales molest,

the evening star a-trembling

from cold in due southwest,

and hear the hammer singing

behind you close somewhere –

It’s no one but Jens Roadman

who still is sitting there.

And so he smoothed for others

the road that’s hard to go,

but when it came to Christmas

his arm said to him ‘No.’

’Twas no one but Jens Roadman,

his hammer fell from sight,

they bore him o’er the heath on

a cold December night.

There stands within the churchyard

a board now half-decayed;

that skews obliquely sideways,

its paintwork faint and frayed.

It’s no one but Jens Roadman,

his life was full of stones,

but on his grave they gave him

not one to mark his bones.

To hear a snatch of the song in Danish, sung by Aksel Schiøtz, go to here.