It was minus nine degrees when I woke this morning. My street caked with ice and snow after a 24-hour storm dumped more than a foot on Massachusetts.
While I brewed a cup of coffee in my kitchen, staring out of the window (and feeling the frost radiating through the glass), it was difficult not to think about poetry. It was that type of day. Cold, wintry, and contemplative.
A certain poem struck me – a fragment really. So I dug through my library until I found it.
I think Henry Wadsworth Longfellow captured this kind of day best:
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 the whispered and revealed
To wood and field.
