The poem begins with a strange, playful image: a green bear rolling among blockhouses, as if the landscape itself has come alive. From there the speaker looks outward, scanning a horizon of alder and birch leaves, cranes, a castle's green cap, a ship, a waste hill, a church and a watchtower. The title places all this near Ilpoinen, but the poem gives us only what the speaker sees, and the sense that it is a small, slightly ordinary edge-of-town view.
The mood shifts between muted and childlike. Windows are "wordless," voices fall like "burnt drops," and the sounds are swallowed by wind and water. Yet the imagery is also whimsical: the ship "playing at planes," the mast standing "on its hands." The ending turns this into a quiet claim. Whatever we are, "cats, aquarians, academicians," we share the same view. The speaker seems to find comfort and wonder in it, calling this "little room" an observatory and its "little things" a constellation. Ordinary surroundings become something like stars.