A stranger has come
To share my room in the house not right in the head,
A girl mad as birds
Bolting the night of the door with her arm her plume.
Strait in the mazed bed
She deludes the heaven-proof house with entering clouds
Yet she deludes with walking the nightmarish room,
At large as the dead,
Or rides the imagined oceans of the male wards.
The girl’s entrance into the “heaven-proof” house goes against the house’s regularities. The house is “heaven-proof,” since good people go to heaven and therefore the girl is good because if she wasn’t, she wouldn’t have to “delude” the house in the first place. It’s a beautiful way of saying the girl isn’t where she belongs: She’s good.
Love in the Asylum