The heart come home from passionate errands

Shouts to the mind good news, that pain

Is driven back from its border; shouts

That a new inch of wisdom's root lies plain,

Pulled slowly up to the light.

Meanwhile mind, within curved walls,

Sits huddled down in the same dark shape:

Heart knows how every wrinkle falls.

Then heart tells how a poet,

With words that hold his honor and his art,

Has arched the gulf of privacy

That keeps two lives not different but apart.

Mind hears the heart insist on its delight

With song intolerable and wild and sure,

Singing of one who fell from the yellow stare

For the fatal sake of intense, lonely light.

Mind shrugs itself to find new attitudes,

Since heart may possibly be right.