Women must weep :: :: University of Virginia Library

In dim and awful trance she lay,
As stiffen'd into stone;
She knew not whether night or day,
Was that which sucked her life away,
And round her ghastly shone,
Like ghosts of memories gone;
She knew a woman grim and gray,
Stitch'd at her bedside without stay,
In stillness long and lone,
With fingers as of bone,
That threaten'd as if fain to slay,
And never uttered tone.

It was not shadow of the night,
Nor day that darkly glowed,
That curtain'd so her straining sight,
And from her drew the lingering might,

Which feebly through her flowed;
As one who helpless row'd,
With labouring oar and hopeless plight,
Against a stream whose struggling light
The rapids nearer show'd,
And hateful doom not owed;
Down, ever down, too fast for fright,
While that weird woman sewed.

She could not move, nor mutter sound;
Though spent her spirit boil'd,
As under iron lid, and bound
Of burden heap'd as burial-ground;
The spell so surely coil'd,
About the fluttering heart it foil'd;
She heard the baying of the hound
Afar, she saw the solemn round
Of grisly hands that spoil'd,
That sapp'd her life and soil'd;
Forgotten deeds she sought and found,
While that strange woman toiled.

She watch'd, as prisoners watch a game,
Through bars that horror shed,
The gruesome thing which closer came,
Until it took the dreadful frame
Which made a bier her bed;
She watch'd it slowly sped,
Until it wrapp'd her round in flame,
And clothed her with its shape of shame,
As to the funeral led;
And then a prayer she pled—
She murmur'd just the Holy Name;
And that gaunt woman fled.