no key

     Someone said to me about Pasternak’s poems: ‘Splendid poems when you explain them all like that, but they need a key supplied with them.’
     No, not supply a key to the poems (dreams), but the poems themselves are a key to understanding everything. But from understanding to accepting there isn’t just a step, there is no step at all; to understand is to accept, there is no other understanding, any other understanding is non-understanding. Not in vain does the French comprendre mean both ‘understand’ and ‘encompass’—that is, ‘accept’ and ‘include’.

—Marina Tsvetaeva, from title essay of Art in the Light of Conscience: Eight Essays on Poetry (Bloodaxe Books, 2010), introduced and translated by Angela Livingstone, p. 173.