It snowed yesterday,
And to-day I have been choked with the pale falling of snow.
It drops steadily,
Slowly,
Sliding in slant lines of white
Against green trees.
The trees burn through it
Like slabs of green water
Beneath the foam of a waterfall.
The trees are permanent and still,
The snow is permanent also,
Light as dust,
Grim as the heave of massed water,
Continuous as the beat of death.
A snow-flake on a path,
A foot treads upon it and it is gone.
Millions by millions of snow-flakes
And a hundred thousand people
Struggle under a smooth, smothering desolation.
In a bitter white twilight
The snow creeps upon the city,
Coming gently,
Little crystals of no account
Dropping down between solid houses,
The warm streets melt it,
But soon their power fails,
The roadways disappear,
The sidewalks sink and fade,
From doorway to opposite doorway
Lies a prairie of sudden snow.
My rhododendron bushes
Are single leaves gasping for air.
My windows are dull eyes
Gazing at a crushed heaven.
The wind flings rattles of sneering laughter
Down the chimneys.
Once there was a sun;
I saw it weeks ago
Commanding a blue sky,
Driving the hours before it in a coloured, satisfactory procession.
Now there is no sky,
Merely a descending of grey particles,
Ordered, open,
A sequence of irony
Deftly possessing itself of the world.
Long ago,
On nights like this,
Wolves howled among these trees;
Now there is silence,
And the sibilant sifting murmur of the snow.
But I expect to hear the wolves,
I expect the house-roof to crumble
And leave me pushing against white drifts,
Chattering nonsense with a parched tongue,
Gone mad with whiteness,
Drowned under the feathers of the snow.
There used to be sleigh-bells,
Little shaken sprays of music,
To make the snow human.
Strong, friendly horses
Trampling the storm with living sinews.
Now—
It slips,
Slips,
Cool,
Still,
Fragile and irrefragable,
And I see it falling on a dead continent
Where there is no more life,
No more desire,
Only the windless cold of an old planet
Voyaging a perpetuity of stars.