from Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke

You see—I have copied your sonnet, because I found that it is lovely and simple and born in the form in which it moves with such quiet decorum. . . . And now I give you this copy because I know that it is important and full of new experience to come upon a work of one’s own again written in a strange hand. Read the lines as though they were someone else’s, and you will feel deep within you how much they are your own.