I know the tunes of every bird,But I, Alkman, found my words and songin the tongueof the strident partridge.

Experience and suffering are the mother of wisdom.

Women of honey-sweet voices, my limbs are weak.They will not bear me. I wish, ah, I wish I werea carefree kingfisher flying over flowering foamwith the halcyons—sea-blue holy birds of spring.

It is not Aphrodite but riotous Eros who isplaying like a child,scuttling down across the tips of meadow ferns.Please, do not crush them.

The guilty man sat among pleasant things under a hanging rock,and from his chair he lookedand then the vision faded.

Now chasms and mountain summits are asleep,and sierra slopes and ravines;creeping things nourished by the dark earth,hillside beasts and generations of bees,monsters in the depths of the purple brine,all lie asleep, and also tribes [...] of flying birds.

The calm sea falls dumbly on the shoreamong a tangle of seaweed.

Three seasons were created: summerand winter and a third in autumn,and even a fourth—the spring—when the fields are heavy with cropsand a glutton still goes hungry.

Get him that enormous caldron on the tripod so he can bloat his stomach with every food.It is cool but soon will boil with good soupwhich gobbler Alkman likes sparkling hot,especially in the cold season of the solstice.The glutton Alkman abstains from fancy dishesbut like the demos eats a plain massive meal.