“How can I keep my soul in me, so that it doesn't touch your soul? How can I raise it high enough, past you, to other things?”

“How can I keep my soul in me, so thatit doesn’t touch your soul? How can I raiseit high enough, past you, to other things?I would like to shelter it, among remotelost objects, in some dark and silent placethat doesn’t resonate when your depths resound.Yet everything that touches us, me and you,takes us together like a violin’s bow,which draws one voice out of two separate strings.Upon what instrument are we two spanned?And what musician holds us in his hand?Oh sweetest song.- Love Song”

“I am, O Anxious One. Don't you hear my voicesurging forth with all my earthly feelings?They yearn so high, that they have sprouted wingsand whitely fly in circles round your face.My soul, dressed in silence, rises upand stands alone before you: can't you see?don't you know that my prayer is growing ripeupon your vision as upon a tree?If you are the dreamer, I am what you dream.But when you want to wake, I am your wish,and I grow strong with all magnificenceand turn myself into a star's vast silenceabove the strange and distant city, Time.”

“Ask no one to speak of you, not even contemptuously. And when time passes and you notice how your name is spreading around among people, don't take it more seriously than any of the other things you find on their lips. Think: your name has turned bad, and get rid of it. Take on another, any other, so that God can call you in the night. And conceal it from everyone.”

“Praise the world to the angel, not what can’t be talked about.You can’t impress him with your grand emotions. In the grand cosmoswhere he so intensely feels, you’re just a novice. So showhim some simple thing shaped for generation after generationuntil it lives in our hands and in our eyes, and it’s ours.Tell him about things. He’ll stand amazed, just as you didbeside the ropemaker in Rome or the potter on the Nile.Show him how happy a thing can be, how innocent and ours;how even grief’s lament purely determines its own shape,serves as a thing, or dies in a thing — and escapesIn ecstasy beyond the violin.”

“ERANNA TO SAPPHOO You wild adept at throwing!Like a spear by other things, I'd lainthere beside my next of kin. Your strainflung me far. To where's beyond my knowing.None can bring me back again.Sisters think upon me as they twine,and the house is full of warm relation.I alone am out of the design,and I tremble like a supplication;for the lovely goddess all creationbowers in legend lives this life of mine.SAPPHO TO ERANNAWith unrest I want to inundate you,want to brandish you, you vine-wreathed stave.Want, like death itself, to penetrate youand to pass you onwards like the graveto the All: to all these things that wait you.”

“I am so afraid of people's words.They describe so distinctly everything:And this they call dog and that they call house,here the start and there the end.I worry about their mockery with words,they know everything, what will be, what was;no mountain is still miraculous;and their house and yard lead right up to God.I want to warn and object: Let the things be!I enjoy listening to the sound they are making.But you always touch: and they hush and stand still.That's how you kill.”