Love in the Asylum

Something a little different today then, a poem.

Not just any piece of verse but quite possibly my favourite one, Dylan’s Thomas’s ‘Love in the Asylum’. I first read this poem in senior school and was immediately attracted to it. There was always something about the bohemian ways of Dylan that appealed to me but the darkness in this piece of work reaches particularly deep into the soul. For me it’s a cry of helplessness, frustration and longing. A longing for the love and companionship that any human being should be allowed, in spite of any disability or other imposed prohibition.

Love in the Asylum
(Dylan Thomas)

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