Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, SNOW-SCENE IN STARLIGHT (TO EDMUND BLUNDEN), by WILLIAM FORCE STEAD


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

SNOW-SCENE IN STARLIGHT (TO EDMUND BLUNDEN), by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Evening aloft in awed expectancy
Last Line: The unresponding and unthinking stars.


EVENING aloft in awed expectancy
Waited the starry advent; and the world
Lay white before us, winter-white, and blue
With earliest drift of twilight. Keenly rose
Cool exhalations, biting spice of snow,
Out of the muffled meadows where we walked
As one who travelling the vague lanes of sleep
Feels that he walks yet hears no footstep fall.

And evening closed; her shadows, flake on flake
Descending, dimmed the recent hyaline,
And crystal lapsed to pallid glimmering,
And pallor paled to ashen. Nearer day
Yielded to that remoter dawn which comes
Pricking the night with splintered rays, when shoot,
Thick in the leafless elm-tops, crowding the oaks,
Whiter than windflowers in the woods of spring,
Those brighter stars of the hard-freezing skies.

No sound there was, nor any wind came down
Molesting those reposeful snow-sown fields;
No wind, no sound, but on an ivory world
Vast width of calm. And then a darkness cut
Across the white, and on the darkness gleamed
Stars, and we stood by the slow river-flood.

Into the tightened silence stole a sound
That made the silence tingle; and we knew
The clicking and the chipping spake of frost
Linking its icy isles against the brink.
We paused to see the brimming darkness flow:
Beyond it, on the farther side, three elms
Rose into night, and their long downward boughs
Swayed to their shadows on the star-bright wave:
And all around them and beyond them, far
A way to the horizon, wintry fields
Swept outward, shading to the darker zone
Where earth's extremity seems on the verge
Of that immensity which lies beyond.

But midway in the frosty solitude,
And single in those miles of drifted snow,
The hearth-lit window of a home unknown
Flickered afar a point of trembling light,
Less than the stars, yet more than they, for it
Looked out across the bleak white loneliness,
Instinct with kinship, calling up in us
Cummunion with the frail humanity
There cherishing the sacraments of life:
And deeply we were drawn to them, and knew
That family, marvellous in their hopes and fears,
Responding hearts and thinking minds, but set
Under tremendous heights of mystery,
Where all around them, and beyond them, far
A way to the horizon, the cold fields
Suffered the hard gaze of blind-staring eyes,
The unresponding and unthinking stars.





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