Self is the only prison that can ever bind the soul; Love is the only angel who can bid the gates unroll; And when he comes to call thee, arise and follow fast; His way may lie through darkness, but it leads to light at last.
Where this text comes from
First published in The Poems of Henry Van Dyke (1920). This date is uncertain. Taken from the 1920 collected edition. That is the printing this text comes from, not the poem's first appearance: the volume gathers work published from 1897 onward, and which earlier book or magazine printed this poem first has not been established here. [1]
Structure read from the source's markup; the words have not been compared against a page scan. Last checked 2026-08-20.
Taken from Standard Ebooks, standardebooks/henry-van-dyke-jr_poetry, poetry.xhtml. Rights: public domain (SE dedication; underlying text pre-1931).
Earlier sources (15)
This poem as JSON or plain text . Line anchors #L1–#L4.
Cite this poem
Henry van Dyke Jr. (1852–1933).
“The Prison and the Angel.” First published in The Poems of Henry Van Dyke (1920).
Text: Poem Index, https://poemindex.org/henry-van-dyke-jr/the-prison-and-the-angel/.
Append #L14 to cite line 14, or #L4-L9 for lines 4–9.
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