Remain foam, Aphrodite, | And - word - return to music

The sea's chest breathes calmly,
But the mad day sparkles
And the foam's pale lilac
In its bowl of turbid blue.

Osip Mandelstam, "Silentium" trans. James Greene.

and i was alive

And I was alive in the blizzard of the blossoming pear,
Myself I stood in the storm of the bird-cherry tree.
It was all leaflife and starshower, unerring, self-shattering power,
And it was all aimed at me.

What is this dire delight flowering fleeing always earth?
What is being? What is truth?

Blossoms rupture and rapture the air,
All hover and hammer,
Time intensified and time intolerable, sweetness raveling rot.
It is now. It is not.

Osip Mandelstam, "And I Was Alive" trans. Christian Wiman

for a pint of honey thou shalt here likely find a gallon of gall

for a dram of pleasure a pound of pain, for an inch of mirth an ell of moan; as ivy doth an oak, these miseries encompass our life, and 'tis the most absurd and ridiculous for any mortal man to look for a perpetual tenor of happiness in his life.

Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (Pt 1, Sec 1, Mem 1, Subs 5)