Winter landscape by Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840)
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.
I know there has been a slight sleep in the posting of these small essays on the blog. This website has by no means been abandoned though, it is simpy that in these periods my energies tend to be directed elsewhere.
Nonetheless, at a certain point the guilt for not dedicating time to the blog reaches a point of meltover and I feel like something has to be done, so here it is: a short look at a short poem–another one of those perfectly rounded and shining little pearls that stud the panoply of English poetry.
Longfellow’s legacy, one of the most popular poets of his day, has been in the wane for many decades. Even that bulwark of all things neutral, Wikipedia, slyly suggests that he ought to be seen as a relic–too occupied with crafting a verse of imitation and sentimentality rather than original substance. There is nothing necessarily wrong with this though–we are a bit too obsessed with innovation in the West–and the fact of the matter is that having penned this one great poem here is grounds enough for immortalisation.
Form
Three stanzas with six lines each. The rhyme scheme reads ABABCC. The meter is roughly iambic, with the first four in tetrameter, the fifth in trimeter and the final in dimeter. Note how clever the syllabic tightening is (together with the visual impression of the shortening of the indentation)–it mimics the subject matter at hand of snowflakes slowly floating to the ground.
Analysis
The first stanza is a brief description of snow falling over a silent, still and because of the winter, colourless landscape. The source of the snow is the personified “Air”-shaking it out of her clothes.
With the second stanza comes Longfellow’s meditation: how often doesn’t the weather impress and affect our mood? Here it is as though the grey skies themselves though become an artistic expression of their own mourning. Just as our emotions create external signs, so do those of nature:
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 idea is further developed in the final stanza–the grief of the sky is a “poem” told in “syllables”. Yet for all its immensity it is subtle–“whispered” only to those of a keen enough sensibility–that of the “wood” and “field”. The suggestion is here the “secret” that the sky hoards is and expresses for the landscape is also unattainable to human beings–nothing but a suggestion of it can be gleaned by the poet.