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As when, O lady mine,
With chiselled touch
The stone unhewn and cold
Becomes a living mould,
The more the marble wastes,
The more the statue grows.
--
Sonnet addressed to Vittoria Colonna; tr. Mrs. Henry Roscoe (Maria Fletcher Roscoe), Vittoria Colonna: Her Life and Poems (1868), p. 169.

 

Michelangelo

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The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
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Between my finger and my thumb
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Every human being has within him an ideal man, just as every piece of marble contains in a rough state a statue as beautiful as the one that Praxiteles the Greek made of the god Apollo.

 

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Where the statue stood
Of Newton with his prism and silent face,
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“O Balder, he who fashion’d us,
And bade us live and move,
Shall weave for Death’s sad heavenly hair
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Whene’er I named his name,—
But at my bidding he hath flown
As swift as frost or flame.
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And finds his form, and springs,
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As well as human things!
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