For the First Snow

We have had the first snow of the year here in Lincoln. To celebrate the peace it brings, I am listening to one of my favourite piano pieces and reading the following wintry poems. 

Do join me.

Snow-Flakes

Out of the bosom of the Air,

      Out of the cloud-folds of her garments shaken,

Over the woodlands brown and bare,

      Over the harvest-fields forsaken,

            Silent, and soft, and slow

            Descends the snow.

Even as our cloudy fancies take

      Suddenly shape in some divine expression,

Even as the troubled heart doth make

      In the white countenance confession,

            The troubled sky reveals

            The grief it feels.

This is the poem of the air,

      Slowly in silent syllables recorded;

This is the secret of despair,

      Long in its cloudy bosom hoarded,

            Now whispered and revealed

            To wood and field. 

 

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Reprinted in the Zoo of the New, ed. Nick Laird and Don Paterson (London, 2017), p. 321

 

"Trees and snow" by Lorenzoclick is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early

and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,

then with cracked hands that ached

from labor in the weekday weather made

banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

 

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.

When the rooms were warm, he’d call,

and slowly I would rise and dress,

fearing the chronic angers of that house,

 

Speaking indifferently to him,

who had driven out the cold

and polished my good shoes as well.

What did I know, what did I know

of love’s austere and lonely offices?

~  Robert Hayden. Reprinted in the Zoo of the New, ed. Nick Laird and Don Paterson (London, 2017), p. 359.

 

"North Maine woods - snow" by thepiper351 is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

The Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter

To regard the frost and the boughs

Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

 

And have been cold a long time

To behold the junipers shagged with ice,

The spruces rough in the distant glitter

 

Of the January sun; and not to think

Of any misery in the sound of the wind,

In the sound of a few leaves,

 

Which is the sound of the land

Full of the same wind

That is blowing in the same bare place

 

For the listener, who listens in the snow,

And, nothing himself, beholds

Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

 

~ Wallace Stevens, reprinted on Poetry Foundation