Arthur Quiller-Couch, ed. 1919. The Oxford Book of English Verse: 1250–1900.
Emily Brontë. 18181848737. The Prisoner
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. |