[Gregory Dowling]

That's a lovely Longfellow, Maryann.

I've come back a little later than I said I would but here's one by Wilbur, which I'm surprised nobody thought of proposing in the earlier threads:

Year's End

[Gregory Palmerino]

Gregory,

Thanks for sharing that Wilbur poem. One of my new favorites!

Cheers,
Greg

[Gregory Dowling]

Pleased to have pleased a fellow Greg, Greg.

[Julie Steiner]

What a gregarious congregation we have here!


The Sky Is Low, the Clouds Are Mean
by Emily Dickinson

The sky is low, the clouds are mean,
A travelling flake of snow
Across a barn or through a rut
Debates if it will go.

A narrow wind complains all day
How some one treated him;
Nature, like us, is sometimes caught
Without her diadem.


Winter Trees
by William Carlos Williams

All the complicated details
of the attiring and
the disattiring are completed!
A liquid moon
moves gently among
the long branches.
Thus having prepared their buds
against a sure winter
the wise trees
stand sleeping in the cold.


I guess the snow hasn't really arrived yet in that last one, but whatever. Cut me some slack, I'm a San Diegan.

[Janice D. Soderling]

I didn't see this one in the other threads though I was sure it would be there.

Anyhoo...

The Snow Man

Wallace Stevens, 1879 - 1955

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.

***

(The snow is melting where I am.)

[Gregory Dowling]

Actually, it was there in one of them, Janice, but always good to see it again.

And here is Anthony Hecht's fine "Sestina d'Inverno", born from his 18-year stint at the University of Rochester (where he taught, among others, David Mason):

Here in this bleak city of Rochester,
Where there are twenty-seven words for "snow,"
Not all of them polite, the wayward mind
Basks in some Yucatan of its own making,
Some coppery, sleek lagoon, or cinnamon island
Alive with lemon tints and burnished natives,

And O that we were there. But here the natives
Of this grey, sunless city of Rochester
Have sown whole mines of salt about their land
(Bare ruined Carthage that it is) while snow
Comes down as if The Flood were in the making.
Yet on that ocean Marvell called the mind

An ark sets forth which is itself the mind,
Bound for some pungent green, some shore whose natives
Blend coriander, cayenne, mint in making
Roasts that would gladden the Earl of Rochester
With sinfulness, and melt a polar snow.
It might be well to remember that an island

Was blessed heaven once, more than an island,
The grand, utopian dream of a noble mind.
In that kind climate the mere thought of snow
Was but a wedding cake; the youthful natives,
Unable to conceive of Rochester,
Made love, and were acrobatic in the making.

Dream as we may, there is far more to making
Do than some wistful reverie of an island,
Especially now when hope lies with the Rochester
Gas and Electric Co., which doesn't mind
Such profitable weather, while the natives
Sink, like Pompeians, under a world of snow.

The one thing indisputable here is snow,
The single verity of heaven's making,
Deeply indifferent to the dreams of the natives,
And the torn hoarding-posters of some island.
Under our igloo skies the frozen mind
Holds to one truth: it is grey, and called Rochester.

No island fantasy survives Rochester,
Where to the natives destiny is snow
That is neither to our mind nor of our making.

[Gregory Palmerino]

Janice,

You can post Stevens' "The Snow Man" as many times as you'd like. It's one of those rare works of art that has successfully managed to explain me to myself. Every time I read it, I am reminded of who I am. For me, that's the definition of a masterpiece.

Cheers,
Greg

[Orwn Acra]

I am still fond of this one, which we published at KIN:

Summer Poem

By Gerður Kristný

In midsummer
the way between our homes
is blocked

the streets snowed up
and neither of us
wants to be the first
to clear away the snow

I remember that you were
not too keen on toil

and I have always
been fond of
snow

[J.A. Crider]

Great thread & thanks for the links to previous ones. Snow poems stay with you. I’ve got two that have followed me for a long time. There’s “Snow Day” by Billy Collins, which opens: “Today we woke up to a revolution of snow,/its white flag waving over everything,/the landscape vanished…” Later Collins’ “…dog will porpoise through the drifts.”

The other poem is “Water Like a Philosopher’s Stone” by Alfred Corn. I found it in a journal at the Benjamin Franklin Library in Mexico City when I lived there. It was Christmastime and homesickness may have colored my regard for the poem, but I think it’s a great avowal of snow’s transformative magic.


Alfred Corn “Water Like a Philospher’s Stone”


Now, out of skies like lead, as the hoary old
cliché describes them, comes a massive snowfall,
no doubt the one barometers deep in the bone
and wide-eyed weathercasters were predicting.

An unplanned celebration for us all:
errands done, there’s time, before we scuttle
home, for a twilight walk, as fine-grained drifts
of industrial diamond renovate a city.

Transmutation of the commonplace,
is it, straightforwardness as magic, making
those throw-out, ugly-duckling shopping bags
turn sculptural, like snow-white swans at gaze?

Or cannily, revealing zinc-gray chain-link
playground fences as the crochet network
they are; that streetlamp, a North Sea lighthouse,
which now comes on and paves the street with gold—
with light. It’s still our street, and, as such, home.