So to drive him out, flicking with my white handkerchief: Go!
But he will not.
Round and round and round
In an impure haste,
Fumbling, a beast in air,
And stumbling, lunging and touching the walls, the bell-wires
About my room!
Always refusing to go out into the air
Above that crash-gulf of the Via de’ Bardi,
Yet blind with frenzy, with cluttered fear.
At last he swerved into the window bay,
But blew back, as if an incoming wind blew him in again.
A strong inrushing wind.
And round and round and round!
Blundering more insane, and leaping, in throbs, to clutch at a corner,
At a wire, at a bell-rope:
On and on, watched relentless by me, round and round in my room,
Round and round and dithering with tiredness and haste and increasing delirium
Flicker-splashing round my room.
I would not let him rest;
Not one instant cleave, cling like a blot with his breast to the wall
In an obscure corner.
Not an instant!
I flicked him on,
Trying to drive him through the window.
Again he swerved into the window bay
And I ran forward, to frighten him forth.
But he rose, and from a terror worse than me he flew past me
Back into my room, and round, round, round in my room
Clutch, cleave, stagger,
Dropping about the air
Getting tired.
Something seemed to blow him back from the window
Every time he swerved at it;
Back on a strange parabola, then round, round, dizzy in my room.
He could not go out,
I also realised....
It was the light of day which he could not enter,
Any more than I could enter the white-hot door of a blast-furnace.