Still let my tyrants know, I am not doomed to wear <br />Year after year in gloom and desolate despair; <br />A messenger of Hope comes every night to me, <br />And offers for short life, eternal liberty. <br /> <br />He comes with western winds, with evening's wandering airs, <br />With that clear dusk of heaven that brings the thickest stars: <br />Winds take a pensive tone, and stars a tender fire, <br />And visions rise, and change, that kill me with desire. <br /> <br />Desire for nothing known in my maturer years, <br />When Joy grew mad with awe, at counting future tears: <br />When, if my spirit's sky was full of flashes warm, <br />I knew not whence they came, from sun or thunderstorm. <br /> <br />But first, a hush of peace -a soundless calm descends; <br />The struggle of distress and fierce impatience ends; <br />Mute music soothes my breast -unuttered harmony <br />That I could never dream, till Earth was lost to me. <br /> <br />Then dawns the Invisible; the Unseen its truth reveals; <br />My outward sense is gone, my inward essence feels; <br />Its wings are almost free -its home, its harbour found; <br />Measuring the gulf, it stoops, and dares the final bound. <br /> <br />O dreadful is the check -intense the agony - <br />When the ear begins to hear, and the eye begins to see; <br />When the pulse begins to throb, the brain to think again, <br />The soul to feel the flesh, and the flesh to feel the chain. <br /> <br />Yet I would lose no sting, would wish no torture less; <br />The more that anguish racks, the earlier it will bless; <br />And robed in fires of hell, or bright with heavenly shine, <br />If it but herald Death, the vision is divine.<br /><br />Emily Jane Brontë<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-prisoner-3/
