Release date is 2026-02-15

Tuula Temonen and Tapio Riikonen

Septemberlyran by Edith Södergran is a collection of lyric poems written in the early 20th century. The book is a modernist, visionary poetry cycle that likely centers on ecstatic self-assertion, nature’s grandeur, mythic imagery, and the spiritual and cultural upheavals of war and renewal.

After a brief preface declaring freedom from strict meter and a trust in instinct, the poems move through blazing mountain vistas, storms, sunsets, and twilight to voice a cosmic “I” that exalts existence, challenges fate, and seeks union with the divine. The speaker prays, prophesies, and admonishes: she honors Nietzsche at his grave, rejects material treasure for longing and spirit, and casts war as an apocalyptic force that belongs to the song’s genius. Love appears as destiny and trial (a counsel to a young woman, a vow to return as a lover’s inescapable fate), while myths and symbols recur—Orpheus taming beasts with a lyre, a healing rose in the Virgin’s hands, a bull that never charges, moonlit omens of blood, and trains of the future demanding grander gates. Across assertive hymns like “Triumph to exist,” elegiac scenes (“The maiden’s death”), and visionary fragments of Petersburg and alpine Engadin, the sequence builds toward a final call to forget the self, face beauty’s terrible demand, and unite with the boundless cosmos. (This is an automatically generated summary.)

Originally published: Helsingfors: Holger Schildts Förlagsaktiebolag, 1918