He gives us in the next stanza a picture of the murderer with noose adjusted to his neck, taking his last look upon the world, and the drop suggests another finely imaged comparison to him—
"'Tis sweet to dance to violins
When Love and Life are fair,"
and goes on so for another two lines before he brings in the antithesis—
"But it is not sweet with nimble feet
To dance upon the air."
The almost morbid fascination the sight of this man with his foot in the grave exercises over him is undiminished, till one day he misses him and knows that he is standing "In black dock's dreadful pen." He himself had been through that dread ordeal and his spirit goes out to him whom he had seen daily for a brief space without ever holding commune with him.
"Like two doomed ships that pass in storm
We had crossed each other's way,"
he writes, and proceeds to explain that it was impossible for them to exchange word or sign, as they never saw each other in the "holy" night but in the "shameful" day. In a passage of rare beauty, one of the finest in the poem, he explains—
"A prison wall was round us both
Two outcast men we were
The world had thrust us from his heart,
And God from out His care:
And the iron gin that waits for Sin
Had caught us in its snare."
The lines in their supreme reticence indicate precisely the agony and despair that filled the heart of C33, and once again a comparison with "Eugene Aram" is forced upon us.
The third period starts with a picture of the doomed man and a scathing bit of satire directed against the prison officials. The wretch is shown to us watched day and night by keen, sleepless eyes, debarred even for a brief second of the privilege of being alone with his thoughts and his misery.