Anna Akhmatova - Man Quotes

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All As Before: against the dining-room windows
Beats the scattered windswept snow,
And I have not changed either,
But a man came to me.
I Asked: "What do you want?"
He Replied: "To be with you in Hell."
I Laughed: "Oh, you'll foredoom
Us both to disaster."

Anna Akhmatova

Sweet to me was not the voice of man,
But the wind's voice was understood by me.
The burdocks and the nettles fed my soul,
But I loved the silver willow best of all.

Anna Akhmatova

All the mirrors on the wall
show a man not yet appeared
who could not enter this white hall.
He is no better and no worse,
but he is free of Lethe's curse:
his warm hand makes a human pledge.
Strayed from the future, can it be
that he will really come to me,
turning left from the bridge?

Anna Akhmatova

Let the gossip roll!
What to me are Hamlet's garters,
or the whirlwind of Salome's dance,
or the tread of the Man in the Iron Mask?
I am more iron than they.

Anna Akhmatova

Oh, who would have dared believe that half-crazed I,
I, sick with grief for the buried past,
I, smoldering on a slow fire,
having lost everything and forgotten all,
would be fated to commemorate a man
so full of strength and will and bright inventions,
who only yesterday it seems, chatted with me,
hiding the tremor of his mortal pain.

Anna Akhmatova