Comments on: enormous snowstorms at the last minute

By: Alicia (AE)

Alicia (AE) — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 07:52:41 +0000

The anti-muse Typo seems to be plaguing me. I guess for me these extended similes in epic are indeed lyric interludes, though I know not strictly in the sense you mean.
Yes, let’s have more Longley!
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By: Mary Meriam

Mary Meriam — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 04:03:02 +0000

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 the dusky brightness
On the child crying for the bird of the snow.
- Edward Thomas
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By: Mary Meriam

Mary Meriam — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 18:43:07 +0000

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
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By: Steve

Steve — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 17:26:01 +0000

Unless there’s snow in Gilgamesh, I think Alicia has it! But the question of when something first becomes a suitable topic for lyric (and the related question of when something first seems to be worth appreciating in poetry for its own sake) is different from the question of when it appears in literature. Or when readers first think it belongs in lyric… Alicia, have we already discussed Michael Longley’s Praxilla poem in this space? If not, do you want to bring it up? Should I? I think it’s time for a Praxilla post.
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By: Alicia (AE)

Alicia (AE) — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 16:10:28 +0000

oops… sorry about the, er, flurry of typos. Should start:
Like the flakes of snow which fall thick on a winter’s day, when Zeus the counsellor has begun to snow and reveals his weaponry to mankind: he stills the finds and pours down a fall without ceasing…
etc.
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By: Alicia (ae)

Alicia (ae) — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 08:36:50 +0000

Thanks for these. I love snow poems.
Surely the snow storm enters Western Literature with the celebrated simile in Iliad XII (280 ff), both sublime and strange in its comparison of a violent volley of stones to a thick snowfall:
here in the Penguin prose Martin Hammond translation:
So these two, shouting their encouragement, spurred on the Achaians’ fighting. Like the flakes of snow which fall thick on a winter’s day, when Zues the counsellor has begun to snow and reveals his weaponry to making: he still the winds and pours down a fall without ceasing, until he has covered the peaks of the high mountains and the sharp headlands and the plains where clover grows and the rich fields of men’s farming: and along the grey sea it piles on inlets and capes, though the waves beating in on it can keep it back: all else is enfolded from above, when Zeus’ shower falls heavy–so thick flew the stones on both sides, on the Trojans, and on the Achaians from Trojan hands, as they hurled them at each other, and the noise of it rose over the whole length of the wall.
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By: yesandno

yesandno — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 20:19:26 +0000

Great post. I adore this poem by David Berman.
SNOW
Walking through a field with my little brother Seth
I pointed to a place where kids had made angels in the snow. 
For some reason, I told him that a troop of angels 
had been shot and dissolved when they hit the ground.
He asked who had shot them and I said a farmer.
Then we were on the roof of the lake. 
The ice looked like a photograph of water.
Why he asked. Why did he shoot them.
I didn’t know where I was going with this.
They were on his property, I said.
When it’s snowing, the outdoors seem like a room.
Today I traded hellos with my neighbor. 
Our voices hung close in the new acoustics. 
A room with the walls blasted to shreds and falling.
We returned to our shoveling, working side by side in silence.
But why were they on his property, he asked.
from Actual Air, 1999
Open City Books, New York
Copyright 1999 by David Berman.
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By: Steve

Steve — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 18:30:48 +0000

Of course, Emerson’s snow storm! Which antedates Whitter’s, I think. Emerson’s poem is a good example of a poem that looks good on first reading but looks better once you try to use historical imagination as well: snow-storms are less scary now than they used to be, and Emerson’s appreciation for its majesty (its alienated majesty, if you like), even its “frolic,” would have been really new.
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By: Don Share

Don Share — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 17:50:42 +0000

Ben,
I’m so glad you mentioned Lucy Larcom! Though mostly known as a poet, today it’s her prose writing that seems really outstanding. Happily, her work is available via Google books:
Landscape In American Poetry is here.
(Her A New England Girlhood, Outlined from Memory, as well as letters and diary are also worth reading.)
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By: Ben Friedlander

Ben Friedlander — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 11:19:31 +0000

All too brief but well worth reading if you’re writing an essay on the subject: the pages on “snow-scenery” in Lucy Larcom’s Landscape in American Poetry (1879), less a monograph than a series of lovingly introduced quotes arranged by theme.
Keeping to that period, Harper’s published “A Christmas Garland of American Poems” in 1857 (not new works, but recent and already classic favorites with new illustrations, only a few of them actually Christmas poems), and this includes “Snow—A Winter Sketch” by Ralph Hoyt:
‘Tis winter, yet there is no sound
Along the air,
Of winds upon their battle-ground,
But gently there,
The snow is falling—all around
How fair—how fair!
Hoyt was one of the NY literati that Poe wrote about in Godey’s Lady’s Book, and his poem (it goes on for 21 stanzas) is a precedent I suspect for Whittier’s “Snow-Bound.” It’s no match for “Snow-Bound,” of course.
The whole Garland is well worth looking at, though. I found it through the Library of Congress’s American Memory website, in particular through The Ninteenth Century in Print: Periodicals. I saved the images for easy access (and teaching purposes) in my flickr account (collected here).
As for Ammons, I’m very fond of this one from Sumerian Vistas, which might well be a comment on Emerson’s “The Snow Storm”:
Eidos
On those late March afternoons
when a flurry nearly rain
eases over and the few big
flakes, old flies, stall,
lift, dive, sweep in a slow
loose-knotted breeze, I watch
the lineations of the dance, air’s
least-holding script, whose
figures carve on my retina
motions the mind mulls over
and subdues to
intelligible reticula, informing shapes.
—————
Fun subject!
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By: Steve

Steve — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 21:06:20 +0000

I’ll take it! But note that neither poet seems to like watching snow fall: we enjoy wild weather more now that it threatens us less. To Ovid by the Black Sea, as to James Thomson, snowstorms are no fun.
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By: Don Share

Don Share — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 20:56:54 +0000

Well, we’ve been talking about Bunting, so how ’bout his “Snow’s on the fellside…”- a version of Horace (Odes, I ix)?
It begins:
Snow’s on the fellside, look! How deep;
our wood’s staggering under its weight.
The burns will be tonguetied while frost lasts…
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By: Aseem Kaul

Aseem Kaul — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 20:26:34 +0000

How about Ovid:
“But when grim winter thrusts forth its rough-set visage,
and earth lies white under marmoreal frost,
when gales and blizzards make the far northern regions
unfit for habitation, then Danube’s ice
feels the weight of those creaking wagons. Snow falls: once fallen
it lies for ever, wind-frosted. Neither sun
nor rain can shift it. Before one fall’s melted, another
comes, and in many places lies two years,
and so fierce the gales, they wrench off rooftops, whirl them
headlong, skittle tall towers.
Men keep out this aching cold with furs and stitched breeches,
only their faces left exposed,
and often the hanging ice in their hair tinkles,
while beards gleam white with frost.
Wine stands unbottled, retaining the shape of its vessel,
so that what you get to drink isn’t liquor, but lumps.”
- Tristia III.10 lines 9-24 (translation by Peter Green)
The original – which goes on for quite a bit longer- for those fluent in Latin (which I’m not):
At cum tristis hiems squalentia protulit ora,
terraque marmoreo est candida facta gelu,
dum prohibet Boreas et nix habitare sub Arcto,
tum patet has gentes axe tremente premi.
Nix iacet, et iactam ne sol pluuiaeque resoluant,
indurat Boreas perpetuamque facit.
Ergo ubi delicuit nondum prior, altera uenit,
et solet in multis bima manere locis;
tantaque commoti uis est Aquilonis, ut altas
aequet humo turres tectaque rapta ferat.
Pellibus et sutis arcent mala frigora bracis,
oraque de toto corpore sola patent.
Saepe sonant moti glacie pendente capilli,
et nitet inducto candida barba gelu;
nudaque consistunt, formam seruantia testae,
uina, nec hausta meri, sed data frusta bibunt.
Quid loquar, ut uincti concrescant frigore riui,
deque lacu fragiles effodiantur aquae?
Ipse, papyrifero qui non angustior amne
miscetur uasto multa per ora freto,
caeruleos uentis latices durantibus, Hister
congelat et tectis in mare serpit aquis;
quaque rates ierant, pedibus nunc itur, et undas
frigore concretas ungula pulsat equi;
perque nouos pontes, subter labentibus undis,
ducunt Sarmatici barbara plaustra boues.
Vix equidem credar, sed, cum sint praemia falsi
nulla, ratam debet testis habere fidem.
Vidimus ingentem glacie consistere pontum,
lubricaque inmotas testa premebat aquas.
Nec uidisse sat est. Durum calcauimus aequor,
undaque non udo sub pede summa fuit.
Si tibi tale fretum quondam, Leandre, fuisset,
non foret angustae mors tua crimen aquae.
Tum neque se pandi possunt delphines in auras
et quamuis Boreas iactatis insonet alis,
fluctus in obsesso gurgite nullus erit;
inclusaeque gelu stabunt in marmore puppes,
nec poterit rigidas findere remus aquas.
Vidimus in glacie pisces haerere ligatos,
sed pars ex illis tum quoque uiua fuit.
(from The Latin Library)
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