Explore "The Vision" by Virna Sheard on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Long had she knelt at the Madonna's shrine, / With the empty chapel, cold and grey, / Telling her beads, while grief with marring line / And bitter tear stole all her youth away.
Outcast was she from what Life holdeth dear; / Banished from joy that other souls might win; / And from the dark beyond she turned with fear, / Being so branded by the mark of sin.
Yet when at last she raised her troubled face, / Haunted by sorrow, whitened by alarms, / Mary leaned down from out the pictured place, / And laid the little Christ within her arms.
Rosy and warm she held Him to her heart, / She -- the abandoned one -- the thing apart.