Poetry Day - A fragment of hope

I mentioned at the start of last week's poem that sometimes hope seems indistinguishable from longing. Here is a poem in which that is the case. The speaker in the poem is a prisoner, talking of the messenger of hope that comes to them every night, and yet it sounds so much like the way CS Lewis writes of that Sehnsucht ...

The Prisoner - A Fragment

by Emily Bronte

(you can read the whole poem here)

"He comes with western winds, with evening's wandering airs,

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.

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--unuttered harmony,

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 gulph, it stoops and dares the final bound ...

Picture from: http://www.flickr.com/photos/28433765@N07/4422201161/ of Vincent van Gogh's Starry Night over the Rhone (1888).