"Foreordination"

Foreordination

Oh, but the long smooth waves kept pushing

        That poor dead, beautiful woman to-day—

Kept ever lifting and taunting and pushing,

        Like all hell’s demons at play.

Oh, but they lipped at her throat and bosom,

        And slid like a zone around her waist,

And into her corsage, across whose fullness

        A scarlet ribbon was laced.

Two thin dread disks of curling lashes

        Parted the gray snow on her eyes; 

Pale were the lips that had known wild kisses—

        Too pale for sobs or sighs.

The smooth, thick ropes of her dusky tresses

        The waves kept winding around her arm,

And around her throat and her poor, bare shoulders, 

        As if to keep them warm.

But marvel not—nor murmur “wherefore;”

        Aeons ere she was given breath

The very of the sea were chosen

        To taunt her after death.

"Foreordination" as it appears in Ella Higginson's Four-Leaf Clover (1901).

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