Strange Rhymes

ON a day of prisoning pain
Came the Muse to me again.
What a poet-prince is Time,
Making Muse and pain to rhyme!

In my hour of loss supreme
Came — what men would call a dream;
Yet that dream, by day and night,
Still has been my pillared light.

In my sharpest agony
Came a healing balm to me
So divine that it sufficed :
Came the vision of the Christ.