TO A LINNET IN A CAGE When Spring is in the fields that stained your wing, And the blue distance is alive with song, And finny quiets of the gabbing spring Rock lilies red and long. At dewy daybreak, I will set you free In ferny turnings of the woodbine lane, Where faint-voiced echoes leave and cross in glee The hilly swollen plain. In draughty houses you forget your tune, The modulator of the changing hours, You want the wide air of the moody noon, And the slanting evening showers. So I will loose you, and your song shall fall When morn is white upon the dewy pane, Across my eyelids, and my soul recall >From worlds of sleeping pain. -- Francis LEDWIDGE