There is a frontier-line in human closeness That love and passion cannot violate-- Though in silence mouth to mouth be soldered And passionate devotion cleave the heart. Here friendship, too, is powerless, and years Of that sublime and fiery happiness When the free soul has broken clear From the slow languor of voluptuousness. Those striving towards it are demented, and If the line seem close enough to broach-- Stricken with sadness...Now you understand Why my heart does not beat beneath your touch.

Thomas; Penguin Classics; ISBN 0-14-042464-4
2009 Selected Poems Trans. She regularly read to soldiers in the military hospitals and on the front line; indeed her later pieces seem to be the voice of those who had struggled and the many Anna Akhmatova has outlived. Akhmatova was able to meet some of her pre-revolutionary acquaintances in 1965 when Anna Akhmatova was allowed to travel to Sicily and England in order to receive the Taormina prize and an honorary doctoral degree from Oxford University accompanied by her lifelong friend and secretary Lydia Chukovskaya.

Akhmatova's first husband Nikolai Gumilev was executed by the Soviet secret police and her son Lev Gumilev and her third husband Nikolay Punin spent many years in the Gulag where Punin died. Anna Andreyevna Gorenko (June 23 [O. The strong and clear leading female voice struck a new chord in Russian poetry.