"Finis"

Finis

“The night is black and cold and wet, 

The winter winds are strong and wild, 

And in the grave beside my own 

This noon they laid a little child― 

So low, so low, so dark and deep, 

This narrow box that I lie in; 

I cannot turn, I cannot weep, 

My chest is sunk, my face is thin. 

“I hear the wind shriek through the trees, 

I hear the hurrying sheets of rain; 

I beat my bony, fleshless hands, 

And feel my eyeballs burn and strain. 

I see again my blazing hearth, 

And its red light strike up the wall; 

I see you lonely in your chair, 

I hear again your tender call. 

 

“Not God, but only fools, would think 

A grave could hold us two apart; 

I’ll burst this lid, and by God’s help 

Beat my way back into your heart!”. . . 

She burst the lid with bleeding hands 

And bruiséd breast, and dug her way, 

Slow, and with patience, inch by inch, 

Up through the clammy, yellow clay. 

Then, strong and eager, struggled down 

The hill, against the tempest’s wrath, 

Into the still, white town below― 

How well she knew that narrow path! 

Then paused, uncertain, at the gate 

Of that dear place where she had dwelt, 

And wondered if her room were changed, 

Or that white bed where she had knelt, 

And tried―and half forgot―to pray, 

Or failed to keep her thoughts above, 

Because one waited for her lips― 

Because two hearts beat fast with love. . . .

She fancied how he sat alone, 

With head down-dropped upon his breast, 

And grieving lips, and saddened eyes, 

And mourned for her, and found no rest. 

She lightly entered, leaped the stair, 

Not one small nook had she forgot, 

Into the warmth of her old room― 

But those two saw her, heard her, not. 

In her old chair beside the hearth 

He sat, and kneeling at his side― 

Tender and lovely as a dream― 

The dead wife saw the living bride. 

Then crept she sobbing up the hill, 

Back to the City of the Dead. 

“O fool! To strive against God’s will! 

Lie in thy grave, content!” she said. . . .

And in the cottage down the hill 

The bridegroom stirred in strange unrest, 

And thought of one in a storm-swept grave, 

With “Finis” carven o’er her breast. 

"Finis" as it appears in Ella Higginson's When the Birds Go North Again (1898).

A draft of "Finis" on onionskin paper, courtesy of the Ella Higginson Papers, Center for Pacific Northwest Studies, Heritage Resources, Western Washington University, Bellingham WA.

"Finis" also appears in the September 1893 issue of The New Peterson.