Lately our poets loiter’d in green lanes,
Content to catch the ballads of the plains;
I fancied I had strength to climb
A loftier station at no distant time,
And might securely from intrusion doze
Upon the flowers thro’ which Ilissus flows.
In those pale olive grounds all voices cease,
And from afar dust fills the paths of Greece.
My slumber broken and my doublet torn,
I find the laurel also bears thorn.
“Camille Claudel lived the last thirty years of her life in an asylum, wondering why, writing letters to her brother the poet, who had signed the papers. Come visit me, she says. Remember I am living here with madwomen, days are long. She did not smoke or stroll. She refused to sculpt. Although they gave her sleep stones – marble and granite and porphyry – she broke them, then collected the pieces and buried these outside the walls at night. Night was when her hands grew, huger and huger until in the photograph they are like two parts of someone else loaded onto her knees.”
Anne Carson | “Short Talk on Sleep Stones”