They sang their mysterious duo, sang of their nameless hope, their death-in-love, their union unending, lost forever in the embrace of night's magic … - Thomas Mann

If poets use such expressions it is because they need them, because emotion and experience force them out of them, and so it is, surely, with me, though you think them unbecoming in me. You are wrong. They are becoming to whoever needs them, and he has no fear of them, because they are forced out of him.

Rough translation of this passage written in French: The body, love, death, these three are just one. For the body, this is the disease and exquisite delight, and this that does die, yes, they are carnal both of them, love and death, and thus their terror and their great magic!

Forbearance in the face of fate, beauty constant under torture, are not merely passive. They are a positive achievement, an explicit triumph.