She sat on the floor
and sorted our a heap of letters:
she took them up like handfuls of dead cold ashesÂ
and let them drop.
She took those familiar pages
and passing strange was the way she looked at them:
so spirits look from above
at the bodies they have shed.
And what life was contained there,
life gone for ever,
and how much grief lingered,
how much gladness and love that had been killed.
In silence I stood apart
and was ready to fall on my knees
full of awe and sadness,
as if I were in the presence of some dear ghost.
Fyodor Ivanovich Tyutchev, trans. Vladimir Nabokov
