| |
| STILL let my tyrants know, I am not doom’d to wear | |
| Year after year in gloom and desolate despair; | |
| A messenger of Hope comes every night to me, | |
| And offers for short life, eternal liberty. | |
| |
| He comes with Western winds, with evening’s wandering airs, | 5 |
| With that clear dusk of heaven that brings the thickest stars: | |
| Winds take a pensive tone, and stars a tender fire, | |
| And visions rise, and change, that kill me with desire. | |
| |
| Desire for nothing known in my maturer years, | |
| When Joy grew mad with awe, at counting future tears: | 10 |
| When, if my spirit’s sky was full of flashes warm, | |
| I knew not whence they came, from sun or thunder-storm. | |
| |
| But first, a hush of peace—a soundless calm descends; | |
| The struggle of distress and fierce impatience ends. | |
| Mute music soothes my breast—unutter’d harmony | 15 |
| That I could never dream, till Earth was lost to me. | |
| |
| Then dawns the Invisible; the Unseen its truth reveals; | |
| My outward sense is gone, my inward essence feels; | |
| Its wings are almost free—its home, its harbour found; | |
| Measuring the gulf, it stoops, and dares the final bound. | 20 |
| |
| O dreadful is the check—intense the agony— | |
| When the ear begins to hear, and the eye begins to see; | |
| When the pulse begins to throb—the brain to think again— | |
| The soul to feel the flesh, and the flesh to feel the chain. | |
| |
| Yet I would lose no sting, would wish no torture less; | 25 |
| The more that anguish racks, the earlier it will bless; | |
| And robed in fires of hell, or bright with heavenly shine, | |
| If it but herald Death, the vision is divine. | |
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