Marie Under (1883–1980)

Your fingers wandered in the silk of my blouse,
Then the cloth from the brooch was released.
And like a blossom a white shoulder emerged,
As from the shirt the breast swelled to be loose:

The passionate heat of your gaze cried out,
As if you were to cancel the debt of love:
The body slid from under the snow-white dress
No part of me is left covered anymore.

From head to toes the passion stripped me.
As through a veil with half-closed eyes
I saw you standing there aquiver,

Admiring the beauty of my body.
Then suddenly desire's flame ignited both of us:
And I fell lost into your arms. - translated from Helged sonetid I from Sonetid

"Under’s youthful poems are predominantly classical in style, but by relaxing adherence to strict structural rules, she succeeded in achieving spontaneity of rhythm even in the most demanding forms. Under’s emphatically feminine imagery is baroquely decorative and derived from the boudoir, saturated with perfumes, colors, flora, especially flowers, and sensual shadings of mood. The basic theme is the radiant ecstasy of love and the rapture of passionate surrender. Under’s love and nature poetry, intense in feeling and graphic in depiction, shocked the contemporary bourgeois public with its erotic explicitness and its almost narcissistic self-absorption. Among younger, more liberal readers, however, her poetry immediately became enormously popular. Sonetid was reprinted three times in 1917, a rare occurrence for that time in Estonia." – Sirje Kiin, from the Introduction to Marie Under: Selected Poetry (2016)