Runeberg was not the only Romantic poet to pique Sibelius’s interest. During his years studying in Helsinki, in 1887, he wrote Trånaden (Longing) JS 203, a five-movement suite for piano and recitation, inspired by Stagnelius’s poem “Suckarnas mystär” (Mystery of the Sighs). Erik Johan Stagnelius (1793–1823) was one of the early Romantics in Sweden. The details of his life are rather obscure. His father was a priest in a small congregation on the island of Oland, where Erik Johan and his five siblings were born. After his father was appointed Bishop of Kalmar in 1807, the family followed him there in 1810. Erik Johan started writing poems in his youth. He began studying theology and law, first in Lund and later in Uppsala with poor results, partly due to his poor health. A clerk’s job as copyist in a central ecclesiastical office in Stockholm from 1815 gave him time to study, write poems and get to know the capitol. His models were Sweden’s Romantic poets: Esaias Tegner, Per Daniel Atterbom and Carl Jonas Love Almqvist. Despite his salaried position, he remained dependent on financial support from his father. Stagnelius’s health was fragile, his manners were bohemian, and he suffered from both alcohol and drug abuse. Gradually he became a reviled outsider and died at the age of thirty. He published a few books during his lifetime, but his breakthrough as a poet came only posthumously, when his complete works were published in 1824–26.

Stagnelius’s early poetry has been said to reflect three different currents, which his biographer Fredrik Böök called “Thule, Zion and Athens.” Thule stands for the Norse sagas. Zion bespeaks his Christian faith and the Biblical symbolic tradition that he had inherited from his early life. Athens stands for the Latin and Greek poetry that he translated (Horace, Propertius). This last bestowed on him the sensuality and hedonism that his puritanical Christian beliefs restricted, and he disguised strong erotic yearning through symbols from classical mythology: “Early on he was attracted to erotic motifs, which he filled with a characteristically sensual, morbid longing and contrasted with loneliness and nocturnal anxiety.