Snow

 There are two poems about snow that I love. One I'm entirely sure you know already — Robert Frost's Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. 

The other you may not have come across; Ben Jonson's poem about Charis. That one isn't about snow strictly speaking, it just has a couplet that crops up within the general effusing about the endless charms of Charis. Where he says:  

Ha' you mark'd but the fall o' the snow

Before the soil hath smutch'd it?

I draw it to your attention not only because it is so very evocative — surely every one of us must have marvelled at freshly fallen snow before somebody took the chance to trudge across it in winter boots with the kitchen compost bin — but also because it has that excellent word 'smutch'.

More than once I've had occasion to incorporate that word into fictional prose, only to have an editor argue with me, insisting that there is no such word in the English language. But then being able to say, "Oh, but there is. Ben Jonson put it in a poem in the 16th century" gets you a free pass to include it in any story you like, because every editor knows they should have read Ben Jonson. Pleasing.

And this morning, here on the Sussex coast, snow was falling in soft light flakes before daybreak. I know this is not big news to anyone living in Minnesota and it's not as startling as if it snowed in Dubai, but here in the very south of England we hold our breath every year wondering if it will snow this time. Because some years it does, but most years we have only frost and not all that much of that.

Our Hebe and Alice absolutely love snow. They are the only people I know who don't mind me banging on their door at six o'clock in the morning in the middle of winter just to make them get up and see the snow. I didn't do that today, but as dawn broke we were excitedly messaging each other photos of our respective gardens.

Their cat Miguel had been out frolicking about in it, and came it to gaze on the beauty from the warmth of the sitting room.

And here, a mile down the hill, we had the most glorious sunrise.

And all this — thinking about the endless flowering of beauty across the face of the earth, so matter how grim and dreary the news might be — reminds me of another dearly loved poem (I'm sure you know this one too) by Gerard Manley Hopkins.

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

    It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

    It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

    And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

    And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

    There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

    Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

    World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.