Thou, my Helsinki, art but none like the whimsical England;
A sultry bruise in its own pretense and fear of foreign lands,
A sordid gate through which oneself ought not to fall,
With curses and dominions of souls awaiting by the wall,
And for we hath none there to live on and feed and exist,
That I had but to restrain my ripe taste for exotic bliss;
I could put neither my mind nor countenance at rest,
All fed from wealth, and churned an insatiable hole in my chest.
My heart is lost, and with a love gone for too long,
Misery has become too good, and cries are far prolonged.
My Helsinki is too sweet, unlike the ****** sun;
Perplexed only by my art at first, but not my literature.
With you, Aurora, all ice shall become ardent and lighter:
My sins shall fade as they penetrate the laden fun,
And the griefs that wash away shall quench the fire,
Returning to me my young snowstorms, and lyre.
I shall long to stride across thy satin-like blue mud,
Keeping my peace at pace within a salubrious heart.
All is thoughtful, my Helsinki; all is wicked but pure inside me,
That I can but love again when fate is too close to see.
Thou hath encased in a little lily my English violet,
A purple evil living on within a shiny swollen pocket.
In a place that is so laden with the promise of death,
Let’s forget our fallen fate and dream without breath.
Let us mock the rolling stars in the sour, unkempt sky;
To believe that England is not alive, that ‘tis but a lie.
To see that England is but a slithering little mire anew,
And a mire among beautiful mud like thee, wise and true.
To hear, or but to see that I can knit a new story,
That thou hath always had conscious faith in me.
Thou, who hath brought the sight of joyful days,
And the promise of such hath entertained me;
The vanished boughs of England once seemed real today,
Which my eyes found too unmerited for us to see.
All the squandered fate to me shall mean nothing,
Nor their grace shall carry the luck of the unknown.
All the wasted feasts that were once everything,
The past hath gone, leaving no absurd reality alone.
To me then, all of my England is oblivious and utterly dead;
That with a salubrious sweat, I shall send it into thorough death.
That the mind alone, of the poet, never loses its imagination,
That the fits it celebrates shall keep the delirium eternally;
That with delight shall celebrate poetry’s reincarnation,
In a daring love and human thought seen at the edge of Helsinki.
Where but did England’s spirit forsake me, every now and then,
I was beneath no love and the care of apparition friends,
That know not how to penetrate a crowd beneath its cheers,
Nor console the sick right in their hearts, all was too weird.
I was dwarfed in those cold whereabouts, I was unloved,
That even my favourite winter seemed too harsh to laugh.
You will tear me away from such despair, I believe;
Grab my hand, and lull it to sleep by the wealth it sees,
Make it rejoice at the fortune for which it writhes—and lives,
Make it love the days for whom it was devotedly decreed.
Ah! For just this once, I shall deliver my congratulations to you;
You have been the cold flower that spoke so clearly and true.
You are the fond memory that woke me from the steep sleep,
The depth that surrounded me in my virile anger, and weeps.
You are the quiet splendour that my mind boasts of, and conceives,
You are the trebled grace that my spirit strives to believe.
You are the one with the trident on the throne;
And you recall all my salubrious and tired moves,
That you say my love is sour yet fresh as warm vinegar,
That my love is a warmth to thee, much less thy solitude,
A solitude that hath been left clueless at its heart,
A solitude so magnanimous and cheerful like a flute.
You are the one who shall consecrate my love,
Make it as firm as the benign loving throne,
You are the one who shall feed from their naught,
Cheer, pamper me with a feat so real to me alone.
You are the one whose fiery fate shall contain me;
That rejects the bad and keeps to me eternally,
No further mist of love hath drifted by me, and all hath been vain,
Thou shalt but catch the one for me; and the colds that remain,
I shall be the first to crave for the form of my love, my man,
I shall be the first to witness the emergence of rain.
I shall be the first to look behind the heatless statue,
To see first the form of a man so definite and true.
Thou shalt me grant a life and solitude far better, not worse,
Thou shalt idolise me as thy special Goddess of words.
And guess who shall but take hold of my pleasurable arms,
The night’s chamber hath lost its insatiable moans, and warmths;
Long since, they all melted down on an antagonistic sunny day,
Riveting as it was, lethal in too many narcissistic ways.
Ever since, they all never came back in any lifelike form,
They are haunting each other in their own abysmal dreams.
That is, nonetheless, just how it should still be,
To be the charmed poet I am, to fathom the world as I do.
That too, my love, is how my poetry shall ever want me,
That a love, as I did know, shall only ever come from you.
Hail! Hail! I feel so newfound and beautifully charmed and true,
Thy wind hath tossed me about like a pink-cheeked village child,
There is no spirit with freshness and joy, indeed, like you,
You gleam like a star, even on the summer moors so wild.
Everyone lives—the idea England seldom wants to confess,
Everyone lives on our art, for everyone and art are at their best.
And guess who is to swim into the heartless, shadowed sea,
For all is not cold and merely awake in our imagination.
The seas, which stir to life on the breaths of a sunny day,
Vitriolic attempts they make, much less their thankless ways.
Hail! Hail! I feel my imagination is about to be restored;
That all wrinkles and pains and worries shall but fade,
I shall again sail to the autumn breezes and daylight cold—
Facing my auburn destiny that ne’er comes too late.
Ah, Helsinki, whose hundreds of Christmas dusts shall overwhelm me,
Open my heart in a fun satire, full of delightful joy.
I seek to celebrate the clear day in thy ice of victory;
A beauty the sun shan’t thaw nor lay nor destroy,
Ah, Helsinki, so beautiful are thy majesty and cordial rains,
A pyre of stars by agreeable mountains, and dramatic friends.
Hail! Hail! My Helsinki is melancholy from what I hath seen,
It appreciates much the work of heaven in worried poetry,
That all solitude is passionately brewed, and born again
Within the real magnitude of love and festive sanctity.
My heart was too young and frivolous to follow the tender nature;
To gain what poetry truly was, nor share its sensible culture,
That once a call of tempt sloshed flippantly over me;
I became corrupt and unable to see the light in thee.
That I was wrong, I was too lighthearted to be wrong;
Bring me back my art—wash me with your newborn love, my Helsinki.
