The Prisoner
Bronte Emily Jane
- 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.
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- He comes with Western winds, with evening's wandering airs,
- 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.
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- Desire for nothing known in my maturer years,
- When Joy grew mad with awe, at counting future tears:
- When, if my spirit's sky was full of flashes warm,
- I knew not whence they came, from sun or thunder-storm.
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- 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
- That I could never dream, till Earth was lost to me.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- Yet I would lose no sting, would wish no torture less;
- 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.
