A love poem addressed to a homeland, and a rough one: “I’m mad about you, my stupid motherland.” The speaker is “flattered” by her game with the whole human crowd, she is his only one — “but how I’d like you to be smart.” The wish that follows is entirely earnest: music everywhere, joy on faces, “the soul embracing the World,” evil gone for ever. Tenderness and exasperation in the same voice — the tone of someone who cannot leave. The insult and the love belong together. The homeland is not idealised; it is addressed as one addresses a difficult relative—angrily, intimately, without the possibility of indifference. That contradiction gives the poem political feeling without turning it into patriotic decoration.