Thursday Text: The Cross of Snow

In an effort to include more poems, quotes, stories, etc., as sources of inspiration, I have decided to shuffle Thursday Tunes with Thursday Text. Today's text is a poem by Longfellow called The Cross of Snow. I first read it in a poetry class not long after I was widowed, so it really stayed with me. I later found out that Longfellow wrote it after seeing a photograph of the Mountain of the Holy Cross in Colorado. Here's the photograph, and below is the poem.


In the long, sleepless watches of the night,
A gentle face--the face of one long dead--
Looks at me from the wall, where round its head
The night-lamp casts a halo of pale light.
Here in this room she died; and soul more white
Never through martyrdom of fire was led
To its repose; nor can in books be read
The legend of a life more benedight.
There is a mountain in the distant West
That, sun-defying, in its deep ravines
Displays a cross of snow upon its side.
Such is the cross I wear upon my breast
These eighteen years, through all the changing scenes
And seasons, changeless since the day she died.