Release date is 2025-12-01

Juhani Kärkkäinen and Tapio Riikonen

"Lauluja rakkaudesta" by Larin-Kyösti is a collection of lyric poems written in the early 20th century. It charts love’s many faces—sensual nights, city masquerades, natural idylls, jealousy, loss, and a growing spiritual hunger—through a restless first‑person voice. Figures like Andaala, Mirtsa, and unnamed beloveds flicker through the poems as emblems of passion, deception, and elusive soul‑kinship, while music, moonlight, and the sea shape the mood. Over time the focus edges from earthly intoxication toward moral reckoning and a longing for the Eternal.

The opening of the collection moves from the intoxicating spring of “Yökukkia” into a nocturnal world of kisses, carnival, and streetlight desire, where Andaala and Mirtsa personify love’s lure and its wounds; satire (“Täti Juoru”), addresses to the moon, and portraits of “the woman” widen the theme. Amid rapture come disillusion and self‑reproach—gifts fail, bedroom glamor fades, and the speaker confesses he sought a deeper “one” he could not find, even as memories (Kätchen), betrayals (“Sinisellä sillalla”), and farewells (“Erolaulu”, “Tuskan tarina”) accumulate. In “Vanha huvimaja” he escapes the summer city to a seaside pavilion and a new beloved, toasts to joy and nature, yet old shadows (Mirtsa) and flashes of jealousy disturb the idyll as sea images mirror love’s changeable force and twilight uncertainty. With “Kirkkauden kunnaalla” the tone turns visionary: a dream reveals three powers—Self‑Admiration, Lust, and Rapture—prompting a turn from the first two toward a higher calling; a prayer to the Eternal follows, then stark mountain parables (the hermit, the lost path, the climb) that seek inner discipline and clarity. Brief nature songs (the aspen’s tremor, spring’s approach) close this beginning on a hush of renewal. (This is an automatically generated summary.)

Originally published: Hämeenlinna: Arvi A. Karisto Oy, 1919