Slogging through the dead of winter with thick-bundled bodies and clouded breath, gingerly stepping from ice-free patch to ice-free patch, cursing the many cold and sunless days till March, we could use a little bright spot in all this gray. Perhaps a snowflake fluttering down just so, perfectly framing the universe for a hushed moment, or a cup of steaming hot chocolate cradled tenderly in grateful fingers, or even a rosy-cheeked young imp flinging a playful snowball across our grumbling brows.

Or—how about this—a selection of poems about winter, snow, and ice, to bring us outside ourselves for a moment, show us the frozen world through someone else's eyes? So take off your coat, put your feet up by our virtual fire, and warm your heart with some winged words about the wintertime.

Charles Baudelaire ("The Cracked Bell")
Yves Bonnefoy ("The Only Rose")
John Hollander ("Effet de Neige")
Victor Hugo ("'Be off!' say Winter's snows..." and "Archangel Winter")
Gail Mazur ("Ice" and "The Idea of Florida During a Midwinter Thaw")
Robert Pack ("Snow Rise," "Storm," and "Midwinter Thaw")
Paul Verlaine ("Covering the land...")

"Ice"
by Gail Mazur
from The Common
Copyright 1995 by The University of Chicago

In the warming house, children lace their skates,
bending, choked, over their thick jackets.

A Franklin stove keeps the place so cozy
it's hard to imagine why anyone would leave,

clumping across the frozen beach to the river.
December's always the same at Ware's Cove,

the first sheer ice, black, then white
and deep until the city sends trucks of men

with wooden barriers to put up the boys'
hockey rink. An hour of skating after school,

of trying wobbly figure-8's, an hour
of distances moved backwards without falling,

then—twilight, the warming house steamy
with girls pulling on boots, their chafed legs

aching. Outside, the hockey players keep
playing, slamming the round black puck

until it's dark, until supper. At night,
a shy girl comes to the cove with her father.

Although there isn't music, they glide
arm in arm onto the blurred surface together,

braced like dancers. She thinks she'll never
be so happy, for who else will find her graceful,

find her perfect, skate with her
in circles outside the emptied rink forever?

"The Idea of Florida During a Winter Thaw"
by Gail Mazur
from The Common
Copyright 1995 by The University of Chicago

Late February, and the air's so balmy
snowdrops and crocuses might be fooled
into early blooming. Then, the inevitable blizzard
will come, blighting our harbingers of spring,
and the numbed yards will go back undercover.
In Florida, it's strawberry season—
shortcake, waffles, berries and cream
will be penciled on the coffeeshop menus.

In Winter Haven, the ballplayers are stretching
and preening, dancing on the basepaths,
giddy as good kids playing hookey. Now,
for a few weeks, statistics won't seem
to matter, for the flushed boys are muscular
and chaste, lovely as lakes to the retired men
watching calisthenics from the grandstands.
Escapees from the cold work of living,

the old men burnish stories of Yaz and the Babe
and the Splendid Splinter. For a few dreamy dollars,
they sit with their wives all day in the sun,
on their own little seat cushions, wearing soft caps
with visors. Their brave recreational vehicles
grow hot in the parking lot, though they're
shaded by live oaks and bottlebrush trees
whose soft bristles graze the top-racks.

At four, the spectators leave in pairs, off
to restaurants for Early Bird Specials.
A salamander scuttles across the quiet
visitors' dugout. The osprey whose nest is atop
the foul pole relaxes. She's raged all afternoon
at balls hit again and again toward her offspring.
Although December's frost killed the winter crop,
there's a pulpy orange-y smell from juice factories....

Down the road, at Cypress Gardens, a woman
trainer flips young alligators over on their backs,
demonstrating their talent for comedy—stroke
their bellies, they're out cold, instantaneously
snoozing. A schoolgirl on vacation gapes,
wonders if she'd ever be brave enough
to try that, to hold a terrifying beast
and turn it into something cartoon-funny.

She stretches a hand toward the toothy sleeper
then takes a step back, to be safe as she reaches.

"The Only Rose"
by Yves Bonnefoy
Translated by John Naughton
from New and Selected Poems
Copyright 1995 by The University of Chicago

I

It's snowing, it's returning to a town
Where, as I discover as I go through
Empty streets I come upon by chance,
I might have happily lived some other childhood.
Beneath the snowflakes I notice façades
More beautiful than anything in this world.
Among us, only Alberti, then Sangallo,
At San Biagio, in the most intense room
That desire has ever built, have approached
This perfection, this absence.

And so I gaze avidly
At these masses the snow hides from me.
I seek, above all, in the wandering
Whiteness, those pediments that rise
To a higher level of appearance.
They tear apart the mist, it is as though,
With a hand freed from weight,
The mortal architect had brought to life,
In a single floral stroke,
The form sought for centuries by
The pain of being born into matter.

II

And up there I cannot tell if it is still
Life, or only joy, that stands out
Against this sky no longer of our world.
Oh you builders,
Not so much of place as of renewed hope,
What is there in the depths of these walls
That open before me? What I see
Along the walls are only empty niches,
Partly stone, partly the absence of stone,
From which, thanks to symmetry,
The weight of being born into exile is lifted.
But snow has gathered there, has piled up,
I draw near to one of them, the lowest,
I bring down a bit of its light
And all at once it is the meadow I walked in at ten,
The bees are buzzing,
What I have in my hands, these flowers, these shadows,
Is it almost honey, is it snow?

III

And then I go on until I am beneath an archway,
The snowflakes are swirling, blotting out
The line between the outside and this room
Where lamps are lit: these, too,
A kind of snow, which hesitates
Between the high and the low, in this night.
It is as though I were at a second threshold.

And beyond, the same sound of bees
In the sound of the snow. What the countless
Summer bees were saying
Seems reflected in the infinite of the lamps.

And I would like
To run, as in the time of the bee, seeking
With my foot the supple ball, for perhaps
I am sleeping, and dreaming, and wandering along
The paths of childhood.

IV

But what I am looking at is hardened snow,
The flakes which have stolen onto the flagstones
And piled up at the base of the columns
Left and right, and far ahead in the dusk.
Absurdly, my eyes can only see the arc
That this mud draws on the stone.
My only thought is for what has
No name, no meaning. Oh my friends,
Alberti, Brunelleschi, Sangallo,
Palladio who beckons from the other shore,
I do not betray you, I still go forward,
The purest form is always the one
Pierced by the mist that fades away,
Trampled snow is the only rose.

"Covering the land..."
by Paul Verlaine
Translated by Norman R. Shapiro
from One Hundred and One Poems by Paul Verlaine: A Bilingual Edition
Copyright 1999 by The University of Chicago

Covering the land—
Dismal, endless plain—
Blurring the terrain,
Snow haze gleams like sand.

Bronze the sky, with no
Glimmering of light:
Is the moon to grow
Dim, and die tonight?

In the woods, close by,
Billows the fog, cloaks
Gray the cloud-like oaks
Floating on the sky.

Bronze the sky, with no
Glimmering of light:
Is the moon to grow
Dim, and die tonight?

Scrawny wolves, and you,
Wheezing ravens, when
Winds blow sharp, what then?
What? What can you do?

Covering the land—
Dismal, endless plain—
Blurring the terrain,
Snow haze gleams like sand.

"The Cracked Bell"
by Charles Baudelaire
Translated by Norman R. Shapiro
from Selected Poems from Les Fleurs du mal: A Bilingual Edition
Copyright 1998 and 1999 by The University of Chicago

How bittersweet it is, on winter's night,
To listen, by the sputtering, smoking fire,
As distant memories, through the fog-dimmed light,
Rise, to the muffled chime of churchbell choir.

Lucky the bell—still full and deep of throat,
Clear-voiced despite its years, strong, eloquent—
That rings, with faithful tongue, its pious note
Like an old soldier, wakeful, in his tent!

My soul lies cracked; and when, in its despair,
Pealing, it tries to fill the cold night air
With its lament, it often sounds, instead,

Like some poor wounded wretch—long left for dead
Beneath a pile of corpses, lying massed
By bloody pool—rattling, gasping his last.

"Snow Rise"
by Robert Pack
from Minding the Sun
Copyright 1996 by Robert Pack; used with permission

Dreaming time has reversed, I watch drowned snow
Appear to lift up from the lake;
Reshaping magnified, each risen flake
Looms in the air, deliberate and slow,
Allowing me to let your picture form and wake
Astonished that you have returned to go
To watch me watch drowned snow lift from the lake.
Dreaming time has reversed—and you,
Your red cheeks radiant against the wind,
Are gliding toward me on the ice into
A frame of glided twilight—I
Again awaken from your being gone to find
Your gloved hands covering your lips' good-bye
So you can watch me watch uplifted snow
As if your absence now concluded long ago.

"Storm"
by Robert Pack
from Minding the Sun
Copyright 1996 by Robert Pack; used with permission

Cascading snowflakes settle in the pines,
Sculpting each tree to fit your ghostly form
The surge of swirling wind defines
As if your human shape were what the storm
Sought to contrive, intending to express
Its consciousness of my white consciousness,
Sculpting each tree to fit your ghostly form.
Cascading snowflakes settle in the pines,
Swaying in unison beneath the snow,
Calling me to you with wild gesturings
Homeward into the howling woods, although
Thinking of your abiding spirit brings
Only a whiter absence to my mind,
Only whirled snow heaped up by whirled snow,
Only a fox whose den I cannot find.

"Midwinter Thaw"
by Robert Pack
from Minding the Sun
Copyright 1996 by Robert Pack; used with permission

Stunned in their voiceless way to be alive
This drizzling three-day January thaw,
Green lilac buds appear that won't survive
When Arctic winds crack down from Canada
And half-starved foxes shake and paw
A rabbit carcass in its stiffened fur.
Green lilac buds appear that won't survive
This third day of our January thaw,
This gap in time, this season not their own,
Merely a mockery of spring
With sun's warmth wasted on a stone,
And still my mind goes groping in the mud to bring
Some stubborn sprouts up through the stubble hay,
To follow in the path of their brief blossoming
In search of brighter green to come. No way!

"'Be off!' say Winter's snows..."
by Victor Hugo
Translated by E. H. and A. M. Blackmore
from Selected Poems of Victor Hugo: A Bilingual Edition
Copyright 2001 by The University of Chicago

"Be off!" say Winter's snows;
"Now it's my turn to sing!"
So, startled, quivering,
Not daring to oppose

(Our fortitude grows dim in
The face of a Quos ego),
Away, my songs, must we go
Before those virile women!

Rain. We are forced to fly,
Everywhere, utterly.
End of the comedy.
Come, swallows, it's good-bye.

Wind, sleet. The branches sway,
Writhing their stunted limbs,
And off the white smoke swims
Across the heavens' gray.

A pallid yellow lingers
Over the chilly dale.
My keyhole blows a gale
Onto my frozen fingers.

"Archangel Winter" (from "Beyond the Earth III")
by Victor Hugo
Translated by E. H. and A. M. Blackmore
from Selected Poems of Victor Hugo: A Bilingual Edition
Copyright 2001 by The University of Chicago

In the dread circle hemmed by glaciers,
Pallid waste where no radiant fathomers,
Columbuses or Gamas, ever pass,
In realms of dingy gloom and deep crevasse
Seized from creation by nonentity,
Beyond ice floe and berg and ice-bound sea,
Deep in the fog that quenches every ray,
In stone waves and rock waters, far from day,
Amid the gloom, there, on the pole, stands black
Archangel Winter, darkness on his back
And trumpet at his lips; nor does he cast
One flash of eye, or blow one clarion-blast;
He never even dreams, being sheer snow;
The winged winds, captives of that age-old foe
Silence, are in his hand—birds in a snare;
His sightless eyes horribly watch the air;
Hoarfrost is in his bones and on his head,
And he is swathed in ever-petrified dread;
He terrifies the Vast, he seems so wild;
He is harsh, dismal, ice—that is, exiled;
The earth beneath his feet, in its dark cape,
Is dumb; he is the mute white stony shape
Set on that tomb in the eternal night;
Never does any motion, sound, or light
Brush the lone giant in that somber pall.
But when, on the timepieces that we call
Stars, the last day, endless and centerless,
Will sound, then the Lord's face will luminesce
And melt the spirit; his mouth will distend
Suddenly, in a savage, dreadful bend,
And the worlds—skiffs rudderless, rolling on—
Will hear the storm-blast of his clarion.

"Effet de Neige" (after the painting La Route de la ferme Saint-Siméon by Claude Monet)
by John Hollander
for Andrew Forge
from The Gazer's Spirit: Poems Speaking to Silent Works of Art
Copyright 1995 by The University of Chicago
"Effet de Neige" copyright 1985 by John Hollander; used with permission

SAYING:

Figures of light and dark, these two are walking
The winter road from the St. Simeon farm
Toward something that the world is pointing toward
At the white place of the road's vanishing
Between the vertex that the far-lit gray
Of tree-dividing sky finally comes down to
And the wide arrowhead the road itself
Comes up with as a means to its own end.
Père and Mère Chose could be in conversation
Or else, like us, sunk into some long gaze
Unreadable from behind—they are well down
The road, but not far enough ahead
For any part of them we can make out
To have been claimed by what we see of what
They move against, or through, or by, or toward.
Toward . . . that seems to be the whispered question
That images of roads, whether composed
By the design of our own silent eyes
Or by the loud hand of painting, always puts.
Where does this all end? What is the vanishing
Point, after all, when finally one reaches
The ordinary, wide scene which begins
To reach out into its own vanishing
From there. Toward . . .

SEEING:

: : : : :

SAYING:

Yes. You'd want that said, (if you
Want anything said at all, which I still doubt)
—The place the road ends, that patch of white paint
marked with a dark stroke from the left, encroached
Upon from the right by far trees, that white place
Sits at the limit of a kind of world
That only you and I can know. Les deux
Choces, Mère and Père, undreaming even of fields
Of meaning like these—the world created by
That square—Oh, 56 x 56
Centimeters—that the height of the canvas
Cuts out of its width (81). Unfair
To mark that square, perhaps: were Mère and Père
Chose to walk out of it, they'd have to pass
Out of the picture of life, as it were, out
Through the back of the picture at the patch of white
At the end of the road. Even if they are staring
Down the long course of the gray slush of things
How can they get the point of how a world
Like theirs ends? From what distant point of vision
Would their world not remain comfortably
Coextensive with everything? How could they know?
What can we know of whatever picture-plane
Against which we have been projected? What . . .

SEEING:

: : : : :

SAYING:

Oh, I know. The snow. The effective snow
Of observation lying on the ground
Given by nature will soak into it.
Wheel tracks entrench themselves in snow, yet painted
Traces of those deep cuts lie thickly upon
The high whites spread over the buried earth.
Shadows keep piling up as surfaces
Are muffled into silence that refuses
To pick up even the quickening of wind
In dense bare branches, or the ubiquitous
Snaps of ice cracking in the hidden air.
Silence. Your way of being. Your way of seeing
Still has to be intoned, as in a lonely
Place of absorbing snow, itself to be
Seen. What you know is only manifest
When I am heard, and what I say is solely
A matter of getting all that right . . .

SEEING:

: : : : :

SAYING:

I know,
I've drifted somewhat from the distant heart
Of the matter of snow here. Both of us have grasped
That patch of white at the very end of the road
As it sits there like an eventual
Sphinx of questioning substance, or a sort
Of Boyg of Normandy . . .

SEEING:

: : : : :

SAYING:

Yes. The obvious
Standing in the way of the truth. A white
Close at the end of distance the two Chose
People might see to be the opening
Out of the road into a way across
Wide, whited fields, a way unframed at last
By trees—or might see as the masonry
Of a far barn, just where the road curves sharply
Right, and appears from here to be overcome
By what it seems to have moved toward. In any
Event, the end of the painted road ends up
In white, in paint too representative
Of too much truth to do much more than lie
High on this surface, guarding the edge of Père
And Mère Chose's square of world, even as they
—Now that you notice it—have just moved past
The edge of that other square cut from the right
Side of the painting, the world of that wise, white,
Silent patch of ultimate paint. You are
Grateful, I know, for just such compensations,
That neither the motionless farm couple trudging
Toward the still dab of white that oscillates
From point to point of meaning—open? closed?—
Nor, indeed, the bit of paint itself can know of.

SEEING:

: : : : :

SAYING:

Mère and Père Chose are walking away from the
Two of us, Docteur and Madame Machin, who stand
Away from their profundity of surface.

SEEING:

: : : : :

SAYING:

The truth, blocking the path of the obvious.

See also:

• Jeannette Mirsky, To the Arctic! The Story of Northern Exploration from Earliest Times
• E. C. Pielou, After the Ice Age: The Return of Life to Glaciated North America
• E. C. Pielou, Fresh Water (includes a chapter about what happens "When Water Freezes")
• E. C. Pielou, A Naturalist's Guide to the Arctic
• Geoffrey K. Pullum, The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax and Other Irreverent Essays on the Study of Language
• Our online catalog of poetry books
• Other excerpts and online essays from University of Chicago Press books