A stranger has come
To share my room in the house not right in the head,
A girl mad as birds
Bolting the night of the door with her arm her plume.
Strait in the mazed bed
She deludes the heaven-proof house with entering clouds
Yet she deludes with walking the nightmarish room,
At large as the dead,
Or rides the imagined oceans of the male wards.
She has come possessed
Who admits the delusive light through the bouncing wall,
Possessed by the skies
She sleeps in the narrow trough yet she walks the dust
Yet raves at her will
On the madhouse boards worn thin by my walking tears.
And taken by light in her arms at long and dear last
I may without fail
Suffer the first vision that set fire to the stars.
this simply is one of the best poems that I have ever read, I frequently turn back to it, as mad as birds set fire to the stars two of the lines most attractive to me I love it
This poem, to me, is about Thomas' love of himself, as A. Nonymous has written. He's trying to find how to love a man who is both a madman and an angel, a man with demons and brilliance. Love, is love of self. And the Asylum is Thomas' own state of mind.
He's talking about his wife Caitlin, she was very mad and full of fury, he's talking about living with her and how chaos and madness is the same as the chaos that gave birth to the universe e.g. set fire to the stars
An unusual setting for a love poem-in an asylum. The woman patient is or was the object of his love. She is 'a girl mad as birds'. He thinks back to when he first saw and loved her, ' I may without fail/ suffer the first vision that set fire to stars'. A great ending.
Strange & dark is this work billowing with a many esoteric underlyings...
This poem has not been translated into any other language yet.
I would like to translate this poem
Wow. I didn't know about this poem. I only found this when I was trying to find the lyrics to the song by the same name by the band Ringside. After reading the poem, I can see that the song is definitely based on the poem. Some of the lines are similar, such as A stranger's come/ To share my room in a house not right in the head. / A girl who's mad as a bird doomed / Shot down from Heaven's bed. and Through delusive light on the bouncing walls / In trenches too narrow to share. / Dying men of madness roar / Of burdens too great to bear. / In the light of her arms she takes me in / The walls disappear. The song makes a lot more sense now. This song was one of my favorites. It's a great song. However, now I'd have to say I like to poem better.