‘Love in the Asylum’ by Dylan Thomas

Love in the Asylum

A stranger has come
To share my room in the house not right in the head,
A girl mad as birds

Munch_ashes-1894
Ashes by Edvard Munch (1894) (www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2012/dec/20/best-exhibitions-2012-edvard-munch-tate)

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.

Dylan Thomas  (27 October 1914 – 9 November 1953)