Snow

First, a poem written around 1,200 or so years ago:

                           River Snow

From a thousand hills, bird flights have vanished;
on ten thousand paths, human traces wiped out:
lone boat, an old man in straw cape and hat,
fishing alone in the cold river snow.

Liu Tsung-Yuan (773-819) (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson (editor and translator), The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry: From Early Times to the Thirteenth Century (Columbia University Press 1984).

There are many things to like about this poem, but I'd like to consider just two of them.  First, note the transition from the vast white world of the first two lines ("a thousand hills . . . ten thousand paths") to the single soul alone in the snow of the final two lines.  Second, the silent stillness of the scene is palpable and paramount; yet, in the original Chinese text (as well as in Burton Watson's faithful translation) descriptive words such as "silence" or "quiet" or "stillness" do not appear.  All is accomplished through implication.  Less is more.

Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858), "Bizen Ukazan"

At one point in his writing life, Wallace Stevens was influenced by Chinese poetry.  The poem that best reflects this influence is "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird."  The opening and closing sections of the poem are evocatively reminiscent of the atmosphere of "River Snow."  Here is Section I in its entirety:

Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

And here is the whole of Section XIII:

It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.

Wallace Stevens, Harmonium (1923).

Stevens was too exuberant to employ this sort of style on a regular basis. But these examples demonstrate that he understood quite well the virtues of traditional Chinese poetry.  This is particularly true of Section I.  In Section XIII, the subjective begins to sneak in:  "It was evening all afternoon./It was snowing/And it was going to snow" is classic (and lovely) Stevens, but would seem slightly out of place in a T'ang Dynasty poem, I think.

Utagawa Hiroshige, "Traveller in Snow"

Finally, an untitled poem by Michael Longley seems at home here:

Between now and one week ago when the snow fell, a bird landed
Where they lie, and made cozier and whiter the white patchwork:
And where I imagine her ashes settling on to his collarbone,
The tracks vanish between wing-tips symmetrically printed.

Michael Longley, Gorse Fires (Secker & Warburg 1991).

The poem is the epigraph to Gorse Fires.  It follows this dedication: "In Memory Of My Parents."

Utagawa Hiroshige, "Snow Falling on a Town"

Christmas, Part Two: "Earth Grown Old"

Christina Rossetti's best-known poem is usually sung or listened to, not read.  I suspect that many of those who sing or listen to the verses are not aware that they were written by Rossetti.  Here is the first stanza of the poem:

In the bleak mid-winter
   Frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron,
   Water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow,
   Snow on snow,
In the bleak mid-winter
   Long ago.

Christina Rossetti, "A Christmas Carol," in Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress and Other Poems (1875 edition).  The lines "Snow had fallen, snow on snow,/Snow on snow" are particularly lovely, I think.

The poem was first published in a periodical in 1872.  Rossetti died in 1894.  In 1906, Gustav Holst set the poem to music.

                  Harald Sohlberg (1869-1935), "Mainstreet, Roros" (1904)

The line "Earth stood hard as iron" in the first stanza of "A Christmas Carol" seems to lead naturally to another seasonal poem by Rossetti.

                    Advent

Earth grown old, yet still so green,
          Deep beneath her crust of cold
Nurses fire unfelt, unseen:
          Earth grown old.

          We who live are quickly told:
Millions more lie hid between
          Inner swathings of her fold.

When will fire break up her screen?
          When will life burst thro' her mould?
Earth, earth, earth, thy cold is keen,
          Earth grown old.

Christina Rossetti, Verses (1893).

As I have mentioned on other occasions, a significant amount of Rossetti's poetry consists of devotional verse.  "Advent" falls within that category. Who are the "millions" who "lie hid between/Inner swathings of her fold"? I presume that they may be those who (to quote from another Rossetti poem) are "sleeping at last, the trouble and tumult over."  Beyond that, I am not qualified to opine on the "meaning" of the poem.  Rossetti has a mystical strain that gives much of her religious verse a riddling quality. And one often senses that her non-theological world lies somewhere between the lines as well.

                             Harald Sohlberg, "A View of Vestfold" (1909)

"The Onset"

One of my favorite poems about the onset of winter is, well, "The Onset" by Robert Frost.  The poem begins as a sort of echo of "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" (which appears a few poems prior to it in Frost's 1923 collection New Hampshire):  the speaker is alone "in dark woods" as the snow commences "on a fated night."  But Frost soon heads off in a different direction, as is his wont.

                Douglas Percy Bliss, "Urban Garden under Snow" (c. 1946)

                       The Onset

Always the same, when on a fated night
At last the gathered snow lets down as white
As may be in dark woods, and with a song
It shall not make again all winter long
Of hissing on the yet uncovered ground,
I almost stumble looking up and round,
As one who overtaken by the end
Gives up his errand, and lets death descend
Upon him where he is, with nothing done
To evil, no important triumph won,
More than if life had never been begun.

Yet all the precedent is on my side:
I know that winter death has never tried
The earth but it has failed:  the snow may heap
In long storms an undrifted four feet deep
As measured against maple, birch, and oak,
It cannot check the peeper's silver croak;
And I shall see the snow all go down hill
In water of a slender April rill
That flashes tail through last year's withered brake
And dead weeds, like a disappearing snake.
Nothing will be left white but here a birch,
And there a clump of houses with a church.

Robert Frost, New Hampshire (1923).

Frost is always nothing if not exact, and I am certain that many of us can testify from experience that Frost's description of the sound of the falling snow "hissing on the yet uncovered ground" is precise and perfect.  The same goes for "I almost stumble looking up and round."  I imagine that a number of us have done exactly that, whether as a child or as an adult. This is why we have poets and artists, isn't it?  To express that which we all "know," but have not yet been able to articulate.

A side-note:  a "peeper" (line 17) is, according to the OED, "a small tree frog of the genus Hyla; esp. (more fully "spring peeper") a very small, brownish-grey tree frog with a dark cross on the back, Hyla crucifer, of eastern North America, the male of which sings in early spring."  Frost's poem "Hyla Brook" (which may be found in Mountain Interval) contains a further consideration of the peeper.

              Stanislawa de Karlowska, "Snow in Russell Square" (c. 1935)

"Again"

There are snowfalls, and then there are snowfalls.  For instance, the snowfall that signals the beginning of winter is a thing unto itself.  As one might expect, it has nothing to do with the "official" date on which winter begins.  It has nothing to do with the solstice.

Rather, this particular snowfall is a sensual and emotional event.  It involves the light (be it early or late), the drift of the wind, and the way in which the snow whirls out of the sky.  A blizzard is not required.  A few flakes will do.  Something inside you says:  Ah, it is here.

                              John Nash, "The Garden in Winter" (c. 1943)

                            Again

Again, great season, sing it through again
Before we fall asleep, sing the slow change
That makes October burn out red and gold
And color bleed into the world and die,
And butterflies among the fluttering leaves
Disguise themselves until the few last leaves
Spin to the ground or to the skimming streams
That carry them along until they sink,
And through the muted land, the nevergreen
Needles and mull and duff of the forest floor,
The wind go ashen, till one afternoon
The cold snow cloud comes down the intervale
Above the river on whose slow black flood
The few first flakes come hurrying in to drown.

Howard Nemerov, The Western Approaches (1975).

                          John Nash, "The Garden under Snow" (c. 1924)

"On, On Let Us Skate Past The Sleeping Willows Dusted With Snow"

Over the past few posts I have inadvertently stumbled into a sort of contemplation of Life and Fate from a cosmic perspective.  It all began innocently enough with Christina Rossetti's "Love hath a name of Death." From there, one thing led to another.

A return to Earth is in order.  Perhaps an ice-skating excursion with Charlotte Mew (following our earlier excursions with Edmund Blunden and A. S. J. Tessimond) will do the trick.  Although, come to think of it, Mew is not exactly the jolly, happy-go-lucky ice-skating type . . .

                             Eliot Hodgkin, "Six Cape Gooseberries" (1954)

                              Smile, Death

Smile, Death, see I smile as I come to you
Straight from the road and the moor that I leave behind,
Nothing on earth to me was like this wind-blown space,
Nothing was like the road, but at the end there was a vision or a face
               And the eyes were not always kind.

    Smile, Death, as you fasten the blades to my feet for me,
On, on let us skate past the sleeping willows dusted with snow;
Fast, fast down the frozen stream, with the moor and the road and the
  vision behind,
    (Show me your face, why the eyes are kind!)
And we will not speak of life or believe in it or remember it as we go.

Charlotte Mew, The Rambling Sailor (1929).  Please note that line 8 is a single line, but the length limitations of this format do not permit it to appear as a single line.  The other (somewhat idiosyncratic) line indentations are Mew's own.

                    Eliot Hodgkin, "Feathers and Hyacinth Heads" (1962)

In a note to the poem, John Newton (the editor and annotator of Mew's Complete Poems) states:  "This poem and 'Moorland Night' are perhaps the poems of Mew's that show the clearest signs of her enthusiasm for Emily Bronte's poetry."  Charlotte Mew, Complete Poems (edited by John Newton) (Penguin 2000).  I would venture to say that, in "Smile, Death," Mew gives Bronte a run for her money when it comes to gloomy moorland meditations.

In any case, I suppose that we have now returned to Earth from the cosmos, after a fashion.

                             Eliot Hodgkin, "Seven Brussels Sprouts" (1955)

Snow, Concluded

The snow that we received earlier this week has mostly vanished. However, the remaining bright white patches upon the lawns (which stay green all winter long in our temperate climate) and in the hollows of the open fields (grey-brown underlaid with green) are lovely.  All of which evokes the titles, at least, of the following two poems.

               Wet Snow

White tree on black tree,
Ghostly appearance fastened on another,
Called up by harsh spells of this wintry weather
You stand in the night as though to speak to me.

I could almost
Say what you do not fail to say; that's why
I turn away, in terror, not to see
A tree stand there hugged by its own ghost.

Ewen McCaig, The Poems of Norman MacCaig (Polygon 2009).

                                           John Nash, "Winter Scene"

          Hedges Freaked with Snow

No argument, no anger, no remorse,
       No dividing of blame.
There was poison in the cup -- why should we ask
       From whose hand it came?

No grief for our dead love, no howling gales
       That through darkness blow,
But the smile of sorrow, a wan winter landscape,
       Hedges freaked with snow.

Robert Graves, New Poems (1962).

                       John Nash, "Melting Snow at Wormingford" (1962)

"In The Gloom Of Whiteness, In The Great Silence Of Snow"

Edward Thomas wrote the following poem on January 7, 1915.  According to R. George Thomas, "the child in the poem is the poet's younger daughter, Myfanwy."  R. George Thomas (editor), The Collected Poems of Edward Thomas (Oxford University Press 1981), page 135.

                  Snow

In the gloom of whiteness,
In the great silence of snow,
A child was sighing
And bitterly saying:  'Oh,
They have killed a white bird up there on her nest,
The down is fluttering from her breast.'
And still it fell through that dusky brightness
On the child crying for the bird of the snow.

Edna Longley (editor), Edward Thomas: The Annotated Collected Poems (Bloodaxe Books 2008).

                         Harald Sohlberg, "Winter, Hvalsbakken" (1926)

In her annotation to the poem, Edna Longley states that "the idea is traditional, as in the riddle of the snow and the sun, which begins:  'White bird featherless/Flew from Paradise.'"  Ibid, page 175.  Longley also notes that the image appears in the "December: Christmass" section of John Clare's Shepherd's Calendar:

And some to view the winter weathers
Climb up the window seat wi glee
Likening the snow to falling feathers
In fancy's infant extacy
Laughing wi superstitious love
Oer visions wild that youth supplyes
Of people pulling geese above
And keeping christmass in the skyes.

(Spelling and punctuation (or the lack thereof) are as they appear in Clare's original manuscript.)  I have previously discussed Thomas's admiring discussion of Clare's poem "Love lies beyond the tomb."  Perhaps Thomas had the above passage in mind when he wrote "Snow."

But, beyond its historical sources, the poem shows Thomas's acute attentiveness to the world around us, and his ability to memorably describe what he sees.  Those of us fortunate enough to have experienced a snowfall will likely agree that these phrases are right on the mark:  "the gloom of whiteness"; "the great silence of snow"; "that dusky brightness."  In one sense, the phrases may seem deceptively commonplace;  we may say:  "Yes, of course, that's exactly what it is like."  But it is the function of the ("true and not feigning") poet to tell us what we all know (or ought to know), but have not yet seen.

                               Harald Sohlberg, "Mainstreet, Roros" (1904)

Snow

Today, we have had an unusually heavy snowfall for this part of the world. Unfortunately, it will disappear in a few days.  But, there it is, for now:  the world transformed.  If you live near the Arctic Circle, do you ever lose this sense of wonder?

                     Explicit Snow

First snow is never all the snows there were
Come back again, but novel in the sun
As though a newness had but just begun.

It does not fall as rain does from nowhere
Or from that cloud spinnakered on the blue,
But from a place we feel we could go to.

As a great actor steps, not from the wings,
But from the play's extension -- all he does
Is move to the seen from the mysterious --

And his performance is the first of all --
The snow falls from its implications and
Stages pure newness on the uncurtained land.

And the hill we've looked out of existence comes
Vivid in its own language; and this tree
Stands self-explained, its own soliloquy.

Ewen McCaig (editor), The Poems of Norman MacCaig (Polygon 2009).

           Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858), "Mount Yuga, Bizen Province"

                          Snow

And so at last it has come.  Quietly.
Has quietly come and changed everything.
This, as we watch, is what we always say:
"It changes everything.  Now we can live."
And we all want to walk out into it.
Walk out into it, at night, and look up,
Thinking that this world is a simple world
While all around us it never ceases.
We can walk for miles down an empty road
And see it swirl down beneath each streetlight.
We can turn and watch our path disappear.
And it continues to quietly come.
It has come, at last, and changed everything.

sip  (Written in Tokyo a long time ago.)

                         Utagawa Hiroshige, "Snow Falling on a Town"

Snowfall

As I began my afternoon walk yesterday, I could see a snow squall out on Puget Sound, approaching from the northwest.  Towards the end of the walk, it overtook me from behind with a sweeping hiss.  Just like that, a swirling white world.

In the following poem, Stanley Cook (1922-1991) takes an antic view of what falling snow might consist of.  Perhaps our new-fangled floating electronic world has rendered Cook's vision quaintly obsolete.  I think not.

                        Douglas Percy Bliss (1900-1984), "Snow at Sheen"

                            Snowfall

A bitter wind is tidying the attic of the sky,
Tearing the past into little pieces of snow
That dodge in three dimensions.  Unable to read
So many bits, I can but guess
They are codings, receipts and final demands
For income tax, insurance and rates,
Or threats to take it out or cut it off
And make you wait and pay to have it back;
Banker's orders you were asked to sign
And haven't to save the treasurer and covenants
You haven't signed either to save him money;
A list of dates of the century's rarer pennies
And a parody, satirising Social Security,
Of the twenty-third psalm; instructions
To sharpen the mower that had you had at the time
Would have saved your tipping the binmen to take it away,
The good reports the children had from school
And a list of pages to look at (Penguin edition)
For character and use of symbolism;
Directions for reaching a wedding once you have left
M62, forms of voting for people
You didn't know or didn't like or liked still less
When you read their guff -- supposing you did --
And apparently didn't vote for anyway, holiday ads.
A flurry of testimonials, too faded to use
In case you imagined at your age
Anyone would offer you another job,
Mixes opaquely to obscure the view;
Bits of a letter melt upon an eyelash.
All about you the bushes, every branch
As stuck with white as a park-keeper's spike,
Retain the litter, the lightly falling debris
Scattering as far as the eye and the mind's eye can see.

Stanley Cook, Woods Beyond a Cornfield: Collected Poems (Smith/Doorstop Books 1995).

                  Douglas Percy Bliss, "A London Square in Winter" (1941)

A Christmas Robin, Out Of Season

Robert Graves is adept at putting a twist on things.  Thus, the Christmas robin in the following poem is, in fact, a February robin.  Still, the out-of-season robin reawakens all that is (to borrow from a well-known song) merry and bright about the holiday.  But it also brings in tow (to borrow from a well-known tale) the spectre of an uncertain future.

                 The Christmas Robin

The snows of February had buried Christmas
Deep in the woods, where grew self-seeded
The fir-trees of a Christmas yet unknown,
Without a candle or a strand of tinsel.

Nevertheless when, hand in hand, plodding
Between the frozen ruts, we lovers paused
And 'Christmas trees!' cried suddenly together,
Christmas was there again, as in December.

We velveted our love with fantasy
Down a long vista-row of Christmas trees,
Whose coloured candles slowly guttered down
As grandchildren came trooping round our knees.

But he knew better, did the Christmas robin --
The murderous robin with his breast aglow
And legs apart, in a spade-handle perched:
He prophesied more snow, and worse than snow.

Robert Graves, Collected Poems (1938).

                            Harald Sohlberg, "A View of Vestfold" (1909)

Frost, Blossoms, Snow, And Moonlight

I am fond of the following poem by W. H. Davies (1871-1940).  It often comes to mind at this time of year.

                 Nailsworth Hill

The Moon, that peeped as she came up,
   Is clear on top, with all her light;
She rests her chin on Nailsworth Hill,
   And, where she looks, the World is white.

White with her light -- or is it Frost,
   Or is it Snow her eyes have seen;
Or is it Cherry blossom there,
   Where no such trees have ever been?

W. H. Davies, Complete Poems (1963).

                     Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858), "Full Moon at Seba"

Over the past few months, when reading Chinese and Japanese poetry, I have been coming across images of frost and blossoms and snow and moonlight being confused.  From China, here is a poem by Li Po:

          Still Night Thoughts

Moonlight in front of my bed --
I took it for frost on the ground!
I lift my eyes to watch the mountain moon,
lower them and dream of home.

Li Po (translated by Burton Watson), The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry: From Early Times to the Thirteenth Century (1984).

The following poem is by Po Chu-i:

                            Village Night

Gray gray of frosty grasses, insects chirp-chirping;
south of the village, north of the village, no sign of travelers.
Alone I go out in front of the gate, gazing over the fields;
in the bright moonlight, buckwheat blossoms are like snow.

Po Chu-i (translated by Burton Watson), Ibid.

                                                     Utagawa Hiroshige
                                            "Reflected Moon, Sarashima"

From Japan, here is a poem by Kokan Shiren (1278-1345):

                         Winter Moon

Opening the window at midnight, the night air cold,
Garden and roof a gleaming white,
I go to the verandah, stretch out my hand to scoop up some snow --
Didn't I know that moonlight won't make a ball?

Kokan Shiren (translated by David Pollack), Zen Poems of the Five Mountains (1985).

And, finally, from Ryokan:

Fresh morning snow in front of the shrine.
The trees!  Are they white with peach blossoms
Or white with snow?
The children and I joyfully throw snowballs.

Ryokan (translated by John Stevens), One Robe, One Bowl: The Zen Poetry of Ryokan (1977).

                                                     Utagawa Hiroshige
                           "Catching Fish by Moonlight on the Tama River"

"Like Noiseless Snow, Or As The Dew Of Night"

The idea that we have been put on Earth in order to find "happiness" is a quaint notion.  I think that a state of equanimity, mixed with mild contentment, combined with a lively curiosity, is the best that one can hope for.  But how does one arrive there?  Good question.  Perhaps chance (or, better, putting oneself in the way of chance) has something to do with it.

            The Coming of Good Luck

So good luck came, and on my roof did light,
Like noiseless snow, or as the dew of night:
Not all at once, but gently, as the trees
Are by the sunbeams tickled by degrees.

Robert Herrick, Hesperides (1648).

                    Laura Knight, "Changing Weather, Southport" (1949)

Herrick also cautions us:

               Few Fortunate

Many we are, and yet but few possess
Those fields of everlasting happiness.

Robert Herrick, Ibid.

                                    Laura Knight, "Wheatfield" (c. 1953)

On the subject of good luck, I had a small bit of it yesterday.  I went to a teriyaki restaurant to have lunch.  As I paid for my meal, I noticed a plastic tray on the counter on which various condiments had been placed.  The tray was white, and was decorated with painted roses.  I noticed some writing in its upper right-hand corner.  I leaned over, and read this:

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
   Old Time is still a-flying:
And this same flower that smiles today,
   Tomorrow will be dying.

Wouldn't Robert Herrick be pleased to know that his poetry can still be found (in a teriyaki shop in Seattle, in the State of Washington, in the United States of America!) 363 years later?

                                   Laura Knight, "Cornfield" (c. 1953)

"March . . . Someone Has Walked Across The Snow, Someone Looking For He Knows Not What"

Two of my favorite Wallace Stevens poems are set in March.  Stevens is a fine poet of winter (and of snow in particular).  He is equally fine when it comes to . . . well, the end of winter.  Here is the first of the two poems (the other will come in a few days).

                 Vacancy in the Park

March . . . Someone has walked across the snow,
Someone looking for he knows not what.

It is like a boat that has pulled away
From a shore at night and disappeared.

It is like a guitar left on a table
By a woman, who has forgotten it.

It is like the feeling of a man
Come back to see a certain house.

The four winds blow through the rustic arbor,
Under its mattresses of vines.

Wallace Stevens, The Rock (1954).

This poem was written when Stevens was in his seventies.  It was published the year before his death.  I have suggested previously that Stevens's late poems have a character that is quite different from his earlier work -- they are less ostentatious and abstract, more straightforward and emotional.  Yet, things are still approached at an angle -- you have to listen to the music and just let it sink in for a while.

                              Pekka Halonen, "Hare in Snow" (c. 1899) 

A Larkin Snow Poem: "Your Life Walking Into Mine"

One perhaps does not expect a snow poem by Philip Larkin to be a metaphysical meditation along the lines of Robert Frost's "Desert Places" or Wallace Stevens's "The Snow Man."  This is certainly not a criticism of Larkin (who can be, at times, as metaphysical as they come):  it simply means that his meditations tend to stay closer to home -- they usually have something to do with getting through the day.  Which is no small thing.

Larkin wrote the following poem on February 1, 1976.  It is untitled.

Morning at last: there in the snow
Your small blunt footprints come and go.
Night has left no more to show,

Not the candle, half-drunk wine,
Or touching joy; only this sign
Of your life walking into mine.

But when they vanish with the rain
What morning woke to will remain,
Whether as happiness or pain.

Philip Larkin, Collected Poems (Faber and Faber 1988).

                                 Harald Sohlberg, "Storgaten" (1904)

"Nothing That Is Not There And The Nothing That Is"

In the third stanza of "Desert Places," Robert Frost writes:

And lonely as it is that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less --
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express.

Not surprisingly, these lines often prompt comparisons with Wallace Stevens's "The Snow Man" -- and not merely on account of the snow.

I still find it hard to credit, but I first encountered "The Snow Man" in a high school literature textbook when I was 14 or 15 years old.  (The fact that it was even in the textbook amazes me:  did the editors have a misguided notion of the capabilities of American youth?  Or, in those faraway days, did they harbor grandiose hopes for the future of literature in this fair land?)  For some unaccountable reason, I recall that the poem was accompanied by an illustration of a jaunty snow man with the usual stove-pipe hat, wool scarf, coal lumps for eyes, and a carrot for a nose.  Of course, I had no idea what the poem was about.

                    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, Harmonium (1923).

             Jan Beerstraaten, "The Castle of Muiden in Winter" (1658)

What does it mean?  Here is what Stevens said:  "I shall explain The Snow Man as an example of the necessity of identifying oneself with reality in order to understand it and enjoy it."  Letter from Wallace Stevens to Hi Simons, April 18, 1944, Letters of Wallace Stevens (1966), page 464.  I take this statement with a grain of salt.  After all, Stevens also said:  "I have the greatest dislike for explanations.  As soon as people are perfectly sure of a poem they are just as likely as not to have no further interest in it; it loses whatever potency it had."  Letter from Wallace Stevens to Ronald Lane Latimer, November 15, 1935, Letters of Wallace Stevens, page 294.

Maybe it is best to approach the poem from another angle entirely.  Here is something that Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote some time before Stevens wrote "The Snow Man":

The sense of the world must lie outside the world.  In the world everything is as it is, and everything happens as it does happen:  in it no value exists -- and if it did exist, it would have no value.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Proposition 6.41 (1921) (translated by D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness; emphasis in original).  Or perhaps it boils down to the final Proposition of the Tractatus:  "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence."  Or, translated differently:  "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."

Two Chinese Snow Poems

Although I am mindful of the inevitable dangers of translation, I enjoy reading Chinese poetry -- in particular, the great poets of the T'ang Dynasty (618-907): Wang Wei, Po Chu-i, Tu Fu, and Li Po.  In recognition of the season, I offer two snow poems.  The translations are by Burton Watson, who, along with Arthur Waley, provided me with an introduction to Chinese verse.

The first poem is by Po Chu-i (772-846):

                         Night Snow

I wondered why the covers felt so cold,
and then I saw how bright my window was.
Night far gone, I know the snow must be deep --
from time to time I hear the bamboos cracking.

                                 Pekka Halonen, "Talvimaisema" (1917)

The second poem is by Liu Tsung-Yuan (773-819):

                              River Snow

From a thousand hills, bird flights have vanished;
on ten thousand paths, human traces wiped out:
lone boat, an old man in straw cape and hat,
fishing alone in the cold river snow.

                             Pekka Halonen, "Winter Landscape" (1919)

"The Fallow Deer At The Lonely House"

The fallow deer in Edward Thomas's "Out in the Dark" bring to mind a poem by Thomas Hardy.  Hardy was familiar with Thomas's poetry:  as I mentioned in a previous post, Edmund Blunden's biographer states that "on Hardy's death in 1928 his widow presented Edmund with Hardy's treasured copy of Edward Thomas's Poems as a memento of [Blunden's] visits [to Hardy]."  Barry Webb, Edmund Blunden: A Biography (1990), page 135.  In The Annotated Collected Poems, Edna Longley suggests that "Out in the Dark" "probably influenced Hardy's 'The Fallow Deer at the Lonely House.'"

   The Fallow Deer at the Lonely House

One without looks in to-night
   Through the curtain-chink
From the sheet of glistening white;
One without looks in to-night
   As we sit and think
   By the fender-brink.

We do not discern those eyes
   Watching in the snow;
Lit by lamps of rosy dyes
We do not discern those eyes
   Wondering, aglow,
   Fourfooted, tiptoe.

Thomas Hardy, Winter Words (1928).

                               John Nash, "Wild Garden, Winter" (1959)

Fallow deer also make an appearance in a poem by John Drinkwater (1882-1937), who was a contemporary of Thomas and Hardy.

                              Deer

Shy in their herding dwell the fallow deer.
They are spirits of wild sense.  Nobody near
Comes upon their pastures.  There a life they live,
Of sufficient beauty, phantom, fugitive,
Treading as in jungles free leopards do,
Printless as evelight, instant as dew.
The great kine are patient, and home-coming sheep
Know our bidding.  The fallow deer keep
Delicate and far their counsels wild,
Never to be folded reconciled
To the spoiling hand as the poor flocks are;
Lightfoot, and swift, and unfamiliar,
These you may not hinder, unconfined
Beautiful flocks of the mind.

John Drinkwater, Loyalties (1919).

                     Spencer Frederick Gore, "Richmond Park" (c. 1914)

"Out In The Dark Over The Snow": Edward Thomas And Robert Frost

Robert Frost's "Desert Places" and "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" put me in mind of a poem by Edward Thomas.  Thomas's poem in turn reminds me of the affinity between Thomas and Frost.  For both of them, the darkness (of a forest or of night or of interstellar space) is frightening as well as alluring:  "The woods are lovely, dark and deep" (Frost); "Dark is the forest and deep, and overhead/Hang stars like seeds of light/In vain" (Thomas); "They cannot scare me with their empty spaces/Between stars" (Frost).  (And consider also Frost's "Acquainted with the Night" and "An Old Man's Winter Night".)

Thomas wrote the first draft of the following poem on Christmas Eve of 1916 while he was on leave with his family at High Beech in Essex.

               Out in the Dark

Out in the dark over the snow
The fallow fawns invisible go
With the fallow doe;
And the winds blow
Fast as the stars are slow.

Stealthily the dark haunts round
And, when a lamp goes, without sound
At a swifter bound
Than the swiftest hound,
Arrives, and all else is drowned;

And star and I and wind and deer
Are in the dark together, -- near,
Yet far, -- and fear
Drums on my ear
In that sage company drear.

How weak and little is the light,
All the universe of sight,
Love and delight,
Before the might,
If you love it not, of night.

                    Eugene Jansson, "Riddarfjarden, Stockholm" (1898)

"The Woods Are Lovely, Dark And Deep"

"Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" and "The Road Not Taken" are probably Robert Frost's "best known" and "best loved" poems.  They are so familiar that it is difficult to read them with freshness.  Although, for Americans of a certain age (I will not presume to speak for any American born after Dwight D. Eisenhower's first term in office), it may not even be necessary to read them since they have been embedded in our memory from an early age.  In any event, they are worth revisiting.

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

                               Akseli Gallen-Kallela, "Winter" (1903)

As a start to considering the artistry behind the poem, I find the following comment by Jay Parini  to be very helpful:  "The aphoristic quality of this little poem, which seems so natural that one cannot imagine its having been invented, is such that one can hardly not memorize it."  Jay Parini, Robert Frost: A Life (1999), page 213 (emphasis in original).

And consider a point of punctuation.  After Frost's death, Edward Connery Lathem "edited" a new edition of Frost's collected poems.  As part of his "editing," Lathem decided to "correct" the punctuation of a number of the poems.  One of his "corrections" was to change the first line of the final stanza from "The woods are lovely, dark and deep" to "The woods are lovely, dark, and deep."  In his excellent study of Frost's poetry, Richard Poirier has this to say about Lathem's change:

In fact, the woods are not, as the Lathem edition would have it (with its obtuse emendation of a comma after the second adjective in line 13), merely "lovely, dark, and deep."  Rather, as Frost in all the editions he supervised intended, they are "lovely, [i.e.] dark and deep"; the loveliness thereby partakes of the depth and darkness which make the woods so ominous.

Richard Poirier, Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing (1977), page 181.

William Pritchard, who has written a fine study of Frost's poetry (Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered), echoes Poirier's criticism of Lathem's change to the line:

"The woods are lovely, dark and deep," now has an added comma after "dark."  It is as if a prim schoolmaster were at work, showing his concern for Robert's getting the correct punctuation into the business or friendly letter so that his English will be Good and Understood By All, rather than "Under a spell so the wrong ones can't find it,/So can't get saved."

William Pritchard, "Frost Revised," Playing It By Ear: Literary Essays and Reviews (1994), page 26.  Fortunately, the original version ("dark and deep") has been restored in the Library of America edition of Frost's poetry and prose edited by Richard Poirier and Mark Richardson. 

                          Peder  Monsted, "Ponte Campovasto" (1914)

"Snow Falling And Night Falling Fast, Oh, Fast"

We have had our first snowfall, a snowfall accompanied by icy winds out of Canada and Alaska.  As always, it was lovely to watch the snow swirl down beneath the streetlights as night came on.  Being in a Robert Frost mood of late, one of his bleaker poems came to mind.  (As has often been noted  -- beginning, perhaps, with Randall Jarrell's fine essay "To the Laodiceans" in 1952 -- the notion of Frost as a grandfatherly, comforting, proverbial poet misses a great deal.)

                         Desert Places

Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.

The woods around it have it -- it is theirs.
All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.

And lonely as it is that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less --
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars -- on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.

Robert Frost, A Further Range (1936).

                       Akseli Gallen-Kallela, "Imatra in Winter" (1893)