Snow-Flakes

I absolutely don’t mind receiving those gifts where you can guess the contents even before they’re unwrapped, namely books and CDs. One of my favourite Christmas gifts this year is a nicely proportioned, well-designed little book full of snow poems, A Mind of Winter. Clearly poets have an affinity for the white stuff and this collection has some beauties. I’m particularly enjoying this one by Mr Longfellow (1807–1882):

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 whispered and revealed
To wood and field.

Whose woods these are

Just back from my regular Wednesday morning run with my friend Tom. We almost didn’t go because of the cold (-10º C) but I’m glad we did: the early morning light in a forest hung with snow is a thing to behold. The snowfall of a few days ago brought down a few large branches so that our route was quite the obstacle course (though enjoyable in its way). It also made our normal half hour significantly longer and, because Tom had to be somewhere, he took the shortcut back to his car. This gave me the chance to enjoy the almost complete quiet (damn the din of traffic) of the woods to myself. I was enjoying the Frostian moment of solitude when it occurred to me that a Frostian moment would necessarily include thoughts of mortality. But that felt right, too. I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.

My Love Is Like to Ice

My love is like to ice, and I to fire:
How comes it then that this her cold so great
Is not dissolved through my so hot desire,
But harder grows the more I her entreat?
Or how comes it that my exceeding heat
Is not allayed by her heart-frozen cold,
But that I burn much more in boiling sweat,
And feel my flames augmented manifold?
What more miraculous thing may be told,
That fire, which all things melts, should harden ice,
And ice, which is congealed with senseless cold,
Should kindle fire by wonderful device?
Such is the power of love in gentle mind,
That it can alter all the course of kind.

Edmund Spenser (1552–1599)

Snow

"Everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it."

So says Mark Twain. The lower mainland has been experiencing record rainfall. Fine. Ditto for the wind. Even the power loss was tolerable. But no Starbucks? If you prick us, do we not bleed? Oh the humanity!

(Well, TG that's over. Never mind.)

A blustery day

Wow. What a day of wind and rain yesterday. 19+ hours without power. I'm glad to be back.