His vision, from the constantly passing bars, has grown so weary that it cannot hold anything else. It seems to him there are a thousand bars, and behind the bars, no world.
As he paces in cramped circles, over and over, the movement of his powerful soft strides is like a ritual dance around a center in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.
Only at times, the curtain of the pupils lifts, quietly. An image enters in, rushes down through the tense, arrested muscles, plunges into the heart and is gone.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke
Ran across this in a book I was reading and loved it, it's actually a translation of the poem as the origional is in German, but this was one of the better translations that I ran across
Meru at 3:11 AM