No hawk hangs over in this air:
The urgent snow is everywhere.
The wing adroiter than a sail
Must lean away from such a gale,
Abandoning its straight intent,
Or else expose tough ligament
And tender flesh to what before
Meant dampened feathers, nothing more.
Forceless upon our backs there fall
Infrequent flakes hexagonal,
Devised in many a curious style
To charm our safety for a while,
Where close to earth like mice we go
Under the horizontal snow.
(From Huntsman, What Quarry (1939) )
Today we are having quite the blizzard, and Millay manages to capture the very essence of being in the midst of a New England snow storm in this poem. No birds were flying about today, they knew that the wind would be too much. And the people who did venture out looked like little mice running around the huge piles of snow that have accumulated in the parking lot. My favorite turn of phrase in this poem is in the second line: "The urgent snow is everywhere." It does indeed seem this way today, and I'm sure it must have looked even more like that in the huge storms they had in Maine when she was a little girl.
No comments:
Post a Comment