Release date is 2026-03-02

Juhani Kärkkäinen and Tapio Riikonen

Kotikuusta kuunnellessa by Niilo Mantere is a collection of poems written in the early 20th century. The verses weave patriotic feeling, Christian devotion, nature praise, and social activism—especially temperance—often voiced as public odes and addresses. They also turn inward to celebrate home, love, and family, with a tone that ranges from rousing and ceremonial to tender and prayerful.

The opening of the collection moves from an ode to a steadfast “home spruce” into civic and patriotic pieces: a prologue honoring J. V. Snellman as the awakener of the Finnish nation, calls to students and teachers to serve light and learning, and powerful temperance poems that lament alcohol’s harms and rally for prohibition. It welcomes freedom as a new spring, praises Finnish landscapes (Puijo, a beloved lake), and exhorts youth to unite for the common good. The sequence then shifts to the domestic sphere with love lyrics to a spouse, a lullaby for a child, and a birthday verse, before offering reflective and devotional poems on autumn and spring, a child’s grave, mortality tempered by hope, the swift passage of time, human smallness and eternal worth, children’s evening and morning prayers, and a Christmas hymn of the Nativity. (This is an automatically generated summary.)

Originally published: Helsinki: Suomalainen Kustannus-Osakeyhtiö Kansa, 1907