A tryst usually suggests a lovers’ secret meeting; in Susan Mitchell’s poem the appointment is with “blind, hunted creeping things.” The speaker announces, almost ceremonially, “I COME to you,” then explains what is being given up: “sun-sweet air and wings / And the blue day.” The poem turns on a willing descent from light and flight into darkness, bonds, and lowliness. Its central idea is that such descents are not accidents to be resented but necessary roads for the heart.
The form supports this movement. Two six-line stanzas share the same rhyme scheme: an alternating quatrain closed by a couplet. Long lines of mostly iambic pentameter open out, then the short second and fourth lines contract — “I come your way,” “And the blue day,” “Shall I complain,” “In bonds and pain?” That pattern enacts the alternation between soaring and being pulled back. The final couplets in both stanzas, with their full rhyme — creep/keep, low/go — give an epigrammatic sense of resolution. The poem sounds like a vow, partly because of its old-fashioned “tryst,” “shall,” and “lords of life,” and partly because the speaker’s repeated “I come” confirms a promise.
Imagery does the poem’s real work. The phrase “sun-sweet air” makes freedom feel almost edible, and “wings” places the speaker in a bright, airborne world. Against that, “clinging darkness” is tactile and sticky; the word “creep” appears twice, imitating the slow, close-to-the-ground motion the speaker now accepts. “Dim citizens” is a striking phrase because it grants civic belonging to creatures usually dismissed as ugly or insignificant. They are blind, hunted, creeping — vulnerable and obscure — yet they are citizens, members of a shadowy commonwealth with whom the speaker keeps a “tryst.” That word matters: it turns suffering or humiliation into an intimate appointment rather than a punishment.
The second stanza moves from description to argument. Remembering the “long, light day,” the speaker asks, “Shall I complain / If for a space I go a heavier way / In bonds and pain?” The expected answer is no. The words “bonds” and “pain” are blunt, not decorated, but they are surrounded by a sense of proportion: this is only “for a space,” one stretch of a larger journey. The last two lines become a small proverb. “The lords of life know neither high nor low” dissolves the hierarchy between the winged creature and the creeping things; “The heart of man by many a road must go” makes the poem universal. Light and dark, flight and crawling, freedom and bondage are all roads, not identities.
What makes the poem significant is the dignity it gives to the downward turns of experience. It does not pretend that darkness is pleasant; it calls it “clinging,” and it admits the way is “heavier.” But it also refuses self-pity. The speaker keeps a tryst — the language of love and loyalty — with what is lowliest. In that choice, the poem offers a quiet moral: the heart is enlarged not only by soaring but by consenting to creep.