A prison gets to be a friend;
Between its ponderous face
And ours a kinsmanship exists,
And in its narrow eyes
We come to look with gratitude
For the appointed beam
It deals us—stated as our food,
And hungered for the same.
We learn to know the planks
That answer to our feet,
So miserable a sound at first
Nor even now so sweet
As plashing in the pools
When memory was a boy,
But a demurer circuit,
A geometric joy.
The posture of the key
That interrupts the day
To our endeavor,—not so real
The cheek of Liberty
As this companion steel,
Whose features day and night
Are present to us as our own
And as escapeless quite.
The narrow round, the stint,
The slow exchange of hope
For something passiver, content
Too steep for looking up,
The liberty we knew
Avoided like a dream,
Too wide for any night but Heaven,
If that indeed redeem.
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