The Soul's Expression

by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

    With stammering lips and insufficient sound
    I strive and struggle to deliver right
    That music of my nature, day and night
    With dream and thought and feeling interwound
    And inly answering all the senses round
    With octaves of a mystic depth and height
    Which step out grandly to the infinite
    From the dark edges of the sensual ground.
    This song of soul I struggle to outbear
    Through portals of the sense, sublime and whole,
    And utter all myself into the air:
    But if I did it, as the thunder-roll
    Breaks its own cloud, my flesh would perish there,
    Before that dread apocalypse of soul.