Dreaming And Drifting In The Snow

Growing up in Tucson, I remember reading poems about snow and becoming deeply enchanted. Snow was something wildly exotic — or something entirely made up and imaginary. Now that I’ve lived in Western Colorado nearly 30 years, snow is of course, much more real — and seems to make me feel simultaneously like a little kid and a bent-over elder.

Here at the base of the Grand Mesa, on the eastern edge of Palisade, where the peaches grow and generous slopes of vineyards overflow into the valley, the snow arrives and changes everything. 

The poets, too, have long been captivated by winter. Consider this little fragment by Linda Pastan: 

snow drifts…shaping itself
to the wish of
any object it touches

I just love that little touch of personification, offering a remarkable image of snowdrifts as beings of surrender. Billy Collins gives us an entirely different take on surrender:

Today we woke up to a revolution of snow,   
its white flag waving over everything,
the landscape vanished…

Donald Hall has a more modern take on the first snow:

Snow fell in the night.
At five-fifteen I woke to a bluish
mounded softness where
the Honda was…

Derek Walcott describes the same phenomenon this way:

Against thin woods, Siberian snow
steadily erases objects from their names…

Emily Dickinson offers a more active image of falling snow:

It reaches to the fence,
It wraps it, rail by rail,
Till it is lost in fleeces;
It flings a crystal veil…

In another stunning winter poem, Dickinson describes falling flakes of snow as “the white souls of the autumn leaves,” which “come back, drifting, drifting.”

This is the kind of metaphor that sneaks up from behind and can forever change the way we see things. This is something Emily Dickinson does over and over again in her work — a feat which makes her one of our most beloved American poets. 

In yet another of her winter poems, she famously begins: 

There’s a certain slant of light,
Winter afternoons—
That oppresses, like the Heft
of Cathedral tunes…

Here she gives us a powerful rendering of that harsh diminishing light, especially if we consider it in contrast with the exquisitely forgiving and soft Autumn light which precedes winter’s stark light.

The time of flying snow and winter’s dark certainly has its shadow side — most of us experience both the quiet joy of the season and the darker, oppressive nature of winter in turns — and everything in between. 

Sylvia Plath gives us these harsh lines:

Winter dawn is the color of metal, 
The trees stiffen into place like burnt nerves…

Yikes! I can feel that one in my bones, in my gut, in my own nerves. 

This is one of the reasons I find poetry a real guiding star in my life — it has no interest in presenting or ascribing to just one side of things — if offers us instead the full spectrum of experience, sensation and perception, reminding us we needn’t land on one emotion and stick to it like glue. As sentient, mindful beings, we’re allowed to feel it all. 

As Auden said, “poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed emotions.”

High desert snow often melts within a day or so; nevertheless it is snow — and first snow, across cultures, is often seen as spiritually relevant. It’s certainly long captured the attention and imagination of the poets.

In winter
all the singing is in
the tops of the trees…
— Mary Oliver 

Wendell Berry reminds us that the winter is a time of reflection, introspection and retreat.

To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

Not only does snow brighten the landscape, it also silences it, deepening our sense of tranquility, calm and mystery.

How is it that the snow
amplifies the silence,
slathers the black bark on limbs…
— Robert Haight

Perhaps one of my favorite snow poems is magical and philosophic and descriptive all at once. It comes by way of Wallace Stevens, whose poem, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” casts a unforgettable spell as it explores silence, movement and perception.  I encourage you to seek out if you don’t know it. It begins: 

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