Release date is 2026-02-20

Tuula Temonen and Tapio Riikonen

Framtidens skugga by Edith Södergran is a modernist poetry collection written in the early 20th century. The book contemplates a visionary future through bold cosmic imagery and ecstatic meditations on Eros, power, fate, and death.

Across its sections, a prophetic lyric voice summons humanity toward a new age as stars, planets, and lightning become emblems of will and transformation. The poems move between defiant declarations of sovereignty and intimate confessions of fragility and solitude, casting Eros as a creative, world-renewing force and the Sun as an overwhelming source of bliss and annihilation. Scenes of initiation and revival—such as a ritual “resurrection”—alternate with reflections on materialism, the body’s charged power, and the struggle to name truth amid ruin. Nature and myth intertwine: an elf-queen’s garden, a roaring waterfall, the hyacinth of spring, and the eagle’s flight become figures for rebirth and audacity. The sequence tends toward a communal hope—the dream of a walled garden where “siblings” remake life—yet ends under the sign of the guiding star, where destiny demands courage equal to its promise. (This is an automatically generated summary.)

Originally published: Helsingfors: Holger Schildts Förlagsaktiebolag, 1920