LA FOLLE DU LOGIS

41Wild wingèd thing, O brought I know not whence

To beat your life out in my life’s low cage;

You strange familiar, nearer than my flesh

Yet distant as a star, that were at first

A child with me a child, yet elfin-far,

And visibly of some unearthly breed;

Mirthfullest mate of all my mortal games,

Yet shedding on them some evasive gleam

Of Latmian loneliness—O even then

Expert to lift the latch of our low door

And profit by the hours when, dusked about

By human misintelligence, we made

Our first weak fledgling flights—

Divine accomplice of those perilous-sweet

Low moth-flights of the unadventured soul

Above the world’s dim garden!—now we sit

After what stretch of years, what stretch of wings,

In the same cage together—still as near

And still as strange!

Only I know at last

That we are fellows till the last night falls,

And that I shall not miss your comrade hands

Till they have closed my lids, and by them set

A taper that—who knows?—may yet shine through.

Sister, my comrade, I have ached for you,

Sometimes, to see you curb your pace to mine,

And bow your Maenad crest to the dull forms

Of human usage; I have loosed your hand

And whispered: “Go! Since I am tethered here”;

And you have turned, and breathing for reply:

“I too am pinioned, as you too are free,”

Have caught me to such undreamed distances

As the last planets see, when they look forth

To the sentinel pacings of the outmost stars—

Nor these alone,

Comrade, my sister, were your gifts. More oft

Has your impalpable wing-brush bared for me

The heart of wonder in familiar things,

Unroofed dull rooms, and hung above my head

42The cloudy glimpses of a vernal moon,

Or all the autumn heaven ripe with stars.

And you have made a secret pact with Sleep,

And when she comes not, or her feet delay,

Toiled in low meadows of gray asphodel

Under a pale sky where no shadows fall,

Then, hooded like her, to my side you steal,

And the night grows like a great rumouring sea,

And you a boat, and I your passenger,

And the tide lifts us with an indrawn breath

Out, out upon the murmurs and the scents,

Through spray of splintered star-beams, or white rage

Of desperate moon-drawn waters—on and on

To some blue sea’s unalterable calm

That ever like a slow-swung mirror rocks

The balanced breasts of sea-birds....

Yet other nights, my sister, you have been

The storm, and I the leaf that fled on it

Terrifically down voids that never knew

The pity of creation—till your touch

Has drawn me back to earth, as, in the dusk,

A scent of lilac from an unseen hedge

Bespeaks the hidden farm, the bedded cows,

And safety, and the sense of human kind....

And I have climbed with you by secret ways

To meet the dews of morning, and have seen

The shy gods like retreating shadows fade,

Or on the thymy reaches have surprised

Old Chiron sleeping, and have waked him not....

Yet farther have I fared with you, and known

Love and his sacred tremors, and the rites

Of his most inward temple; and beyond

Have seen the long grey waste where lonely thoughts

Listen and wander where a city stood.

43And creeping down by waterless defiles

Under an iron midnight, have I kept

My vigil in the waste till dawn began

To walk among the ruins, and I saw

A sapling rooted in a fissured plinth,

And a wren’s nest in the thunder-threatening hand

Of some old god of granite....

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