I wanted to find out whether learning more about the poet would help me warm to the poem, and I think it has. For starters, the poem no longer seems like juvenilia to me, since it appears in a book dated 1935, six years before Boye's death by suicide and after two other books. (I know, you can't tell how old a poem is by the date of the book in which it appears, but the facts of Boye's gradual coming out suggest that she wrote it during an adult period of struggle.)
In case anybody's curious:
More by and about Karin Boye.
When the translators' names are revealed, my question for the translator is whether, in the original, the line "the cave is sealed" is a biblical allusion to the burial of Christ. Just wondering.