O the old wall here! How I could pass <br />Life in a long midsummer day, <br />My feet confined to a plot of grass, <br />My eyes from a wall not once away! <br /> <br />And lush and lithe do the creepers clothe <br />Yon wall I watch, with a wealth of green: <br />Its bald red bricks draped, nothing loath, <br />In lappets of tangle they laugh between. <br /> <br />Now, what is it makes pulsate the robe? <br />Why tremble the sprays? What life o'erbrims <br />The body,--the house no eye can probe,-- <br />Divined, as beneath a robe, the limbs? <br /> <br />And there again! But my heart may guess <br />Who tripped behind; and she sang, perhaps: <br />So the old wall throbbed, and its life's excess <br />Died out and away in the leafy wraps. <br /> <br />Wall upon wall are between us: life <br />And song should away from heart to heart! <br />I--prison-bird, with a ruddy strife <br />At breast, and a lip whence storm-notes start-- <br /> <br />Hold on, hope hard in the subtle thing <br />That's spirit: tho' cloistered fast, soar free; <br />Account as wood, brick, stone, this ring <br />Of the rueful neighbours, and--forth to thee!<br /><br />Robert Browning<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/a-wall/
