Not least thanks to the Hanseatic League's expansive economy that lasted for centuries, the Baltic Sea coast flaunts a string of opulent red-tile churches built in the Middle Ages. Today they present themselves variously. One is the rich church of the merchants and the council (St. Nikolai in Stralsund), one is the proud testimony of a world heritage (St. Nikolai in Wismar), one is, in a nutshell, the pearl itself (Doberan Minster). And then we have St. Mary's in Lubeck, the very mother of these Gothic brick basilicas. They take a common pride in being what they are.

They also have their brick walls in common, made of "Backstein", baked stone of burnt clay. Södergran – this is my conjecture – has made use of something the German language knows about bricks in order to resuscitate a dead metaphor. Most languages are middens of dead metaphors, of life gone stiff. Stolsben is one of these stiffs, gripa tillfället another. "Hope" provides a basic course in metaphor revival. Bricks are heated, burned, i.e. baked; a baker employs dough; the dough will rise. All of this constitutes a craft: a German Gothic basilica was hand-made the way Södergran's poem was.

The southern Baltic Sea Route is known as "Route der Backsteingotik" (cf. www.eurob.org), but in fact it is only a section of Europe’s long stretches of brick Gothic. As a space, the Baltic Sea is one and indivisible. Among other things, Turku Cathedral, one of Mary´s many churches, is quite recognizably part of this context.

If you can turn away from Gothic and focus instead on baked stone in sacred use, you can get much closer to Edith Södergran and the world she knew. In 1907, the very year she wrote her first poems, the Church on Spilled Blood was inaugurated in St. Petersburg on the spot where Alexander II was murdered, almost next door to her school. It does not aspire to heaven the way Gothic architecture does, but it was baked in dark red brick. Its baker was the Russian architect Alfred Parland, whose fraternal grandson Henry Parland was later, much like Edith Södergran, to enrich Finnish-Swedish modernism with a hotchpotch of linguistic origins.

Clas Zilliacus