La Folle Du Logis by Edith Wharton

Wild 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 / The 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. / And 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.