The Healing Journey

Poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow lost his wife Fanny at 44 in a tragic accident that left him scarred physically and emotionally. A month after she died, Longfellow wrote to his wife’s sister Mary: “How I am alive after what my eyes have seen, I know not. I am at least patient, if not resigned, and I thank God hourly — as I have from the beginning — for the beautiful life we led together, and that I loved her more and more to the end.”

It was 18 years before he could express his loss in the poem titled “The Cross of Snow.” Of his more than 1000 poems, it was the only one that expressed his grief, in 14 short lines. The Mount of the Holy Cross is a prominent summit in the northern Sawatch Range of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado.

The Cross of Snow

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.

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