THE GIFT POSSESSED
To a Caged Bird
Thy home, gay songster, is the free Far leagues of space's immensity— Dim woods and quiet, leafy bowers; Yet from thy prison small and bare Thy soul, forgetting bounds, doth fare In strains that shame man's cruel powers.
Wings hast thou, and the instinctive sense That, free, thou couldst pierce the immense Far stretches of a luring sky; And yet, forbidden, thou thy wings Foldest, while from thy heart upsprings Sweet strains thy lot to glorify.
O bird! would that my heart, like thine Earth-bound, could still feel the divine Sweet issues of the gift of life— And should to me heaven aught deny, Would that I still might glorify The gift possessed—come calm or strife.