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Michelangelo - Sonnet XXXIV - Eternal fire is kindly to cold stone
Identifier
024470
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
Michelangelo – Sonnets [translated by Elizabeth Jennings]
Sonnet XXXIV
Eternal fire is kindly to cold stone
And draws strength from it. And though stone may fall
To ashes, it has never really gone
But lives in fire and is not lost at all.
And if, in furnaces, through every season
It lasts, it has achieved a higher place,
Just as a purged soul moves from its own prison
And flies to heaven adorned with every grace.
It is the same with me when fierce desires
Reduce me to pale ashes, dry and cold:
I am not lost but find new life indeed.
If I can rise from ashes which seem dead
And come unscathed from these consuming fires,
I am not forged from iron but from gold.