Mine is the high room in heaven.

The task at hand is long and dull,
Long days and long nights to haunt,
The days drag the leaden foot up,
To fall down to that hard a blow.

This place is foreign to the heart,
All sights that meet the eye are bad
The delicate blue of the high flowers,
Or the depth of the beauteous sea;

The light sky, the white rain, all is false,
This away from home I am to be,
What good will the comforting cold do,
It cannot cool passion’s hell-fire.

How odd the working of the architect,
Such beauty and yet such discomfort,
In all that the senses feel and relish,
The cruel heart is never satisfied.

The senses delight in forbidden fruits,
If they be forbidden, why grow?
Nurtured by the tears of the cursed,
They grow downwards to a pit.

He carved hard the steps of stone,
All to Home that lead,
And made me lame and with fiery tongue
That could there never reach.

There are slight flowers of beauty,
That grow along the rocky steep steps,
What sense in them to my bloodied brow,
If not to crush them in spite?

Then I fall a hundred feet
And they mock me all in disdain,
But no laugh to me is bitter,
So higher that I cannot hear!

But my home is there high up, I point,
Higher than all theirs to see,
Since I want higher the room in Heaven,
That higher I need to climb.