This poem appeared in Södergran’s debut collection, Dikter (Poems), and it is perhaps the best known and most quoted of all her work. As with most of her poetry, it is written in free verse. At the time, so free a prosody was highly unusual for lyrical poetry in Swedish, a language whose natural melody, tones, and cadences lend themselves to songlike verse.

But Södergran found regular rhythms and end rhymes stifling. She wrote in an introductory remark to her second collection that her poems “are to be taken as careless sketches” (Love & Solitude xi).

The Day Cools . . . (Dagen svalnar . . .) is written as a sequence of four numbered stanzas. Each stanza serves as a separate “sketch,” and the four of them together tell a story of love, lust, and loss. True to Western lyrical tradition, which dates back to the ancient Greeks, this poem features a first-person speaker, an “I” addressing a beloved, a “you.” In classic lyrical poetry the “I” speaks in metaphors to describe emotions so abstract and incomprehensible that they can be communicated only via images and associations.

But Södergran, whose early published work reflects the influence of French and Russian symbolist poetry, crafts her images to induce a sensual reception rather than an identifiable emotion. Unlike classical lyricists, she does not project her images onto a symbolic canvas that stands apart from the persons in the poem. For example, when the speaker of Shakespeare’s famous 18th sonnet asks, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” the image of the summer day takes the place of his lady love’s physical form, rendering her to an abstraction so that we can perceive the speaker’s idea of her.

But in The Day Cools . . ., as in most of Södergran’s poems, the speaker melds the figure of her physical body with its associated image, which results in a sensual experience as well as an emotional one. The poem begins: “The day cools toward evening . . . ,” emphasizing physical sensation—a drop in temperature—rather than an image of a darkening sky. The speaker then urges her lover: “Drink the warmth from my hand, / it throbs with Spring’s own blood.” This image evokes both the speaker’s desire to give herself physically to her lover and her close kinship—a blood relation—to the Earth.

The female body’s strong association with the Earth and its natural cycles is a recurring theme in Södergran’s poetry. While Södergran’s biographers have speculated that she wrote this poem in response to a failed love affair with a married doctor at the Davos sanatorium, feminist scholars have focused instead on the poem’s unabashed presentation of a sexual, creative, and psychologically complex female speaker.

The poem’s stylistic innovations, arresting imagery, and distinctly female speaker have earned it an honored place in literary history. But perhaps the poem’s greatest legacy is its power to reach across time and space to stir the sensual receptors of readers who have forgotten how it is to love with abandon and descend into despair.

Bibliography
Södergran, Edith. Love & Solitude: Selected Poems 1916–1923. Translated by Stina Katchadourian. Seattle: Fjord Press, 1992.