For weeks the snow went riding by,
Borne on the high, shrill winds
That seethed thro’ cracks and eddied the grain
In the farmer’s well-filled bins,
Or mourned—poor outcasts of the night—
As a penitent for his sins.
For weeks the snow spun round the hill,
And settled on the lea;
It climbed up high about the doors,
And spangled every tree;
It reached one soft, white, jeweled arm
Around the cold, dark sea.
It deepened on the frozen mere
And on the frozen bay;
And on the porches and the roofs
Unevenly it lay,
Until the wind sprung from the North
And carried it away,
And bore it, hissing, up the air
In a long, funnelled whirl;
Or pressed its bulk around some tree
In a deep, voluptuous curl;
Or hurried it down to the South
In a nervous, blinding swirl.
Long icicles grew, drop on drop,
And hung from all the eaves,
And every pane was frescoed o’er
With pictures Zero weaves—
Like cobwebs, when the heavy frost
Is on the autumn leaves.
And still the snow fell on the fields
That once were sweet with hay,
And on the lawn where, soft and deep,
Once cherry blossoms lay. . .
And on the grave of the little child
That laughed with us last May.
“The Snow” as it appears in Higginson’s When the Birds Go North Again (1898).
A draft of “The Snow,” courtesy of the Ella Higginson Papers, Center for Pacific Northwest Studies, Heritage Resources, Western Washington University, Bellingham Washington.