Read "A Woman's Hand" by Ella Wheeler Wilcox online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
All day long there has haunted me / A spectre out of my lost youth-land. / Because I happened last night to see / A woman's beautiful snow-white hand.
Like part of a statue broken away, / And carefully kept in a velvet case, / On the crimson rim of her box it lay; / The folds of the curtain hid her face.
Years had drifted between us two, / In another clime, in another land, / We had lived and parted, and yet I knew / That cruelly beautiful perfect hand.
The ringless beauty of fingers fine, / The sea-shell tint of their taper tips, / The sight of them stirred my blood like wine, / Oh, to hold them again to my lips!
To feel their tender touch on my hair, / Their mute caress, and their clinging hold; / Oh for the past that was green and fair, / With a cloudless sky, and a sun of gold!
But the sun has set, and a dead delight / Shadows my life with a dull despair, / Oh why did I see that hand of white, / Like a marble ornament lying there?