We are onto our fifth day of snow. The mail was picked up yesterday from the local post office for the first time since last Tuesday. You know what this means?
There will be snow poems. The somewhat slushy ones will arrive right away. Editors will be greeting them as soon as next week. About six months later, the good ones will have matured like cheese. They’ll arrive in good time for next winter.
Snow still makes us stop still and marvel. It musters awe. It stops the traffic. In the UK, where snow these days is a rarity, it manages to stop everything. Just as long as you live in a warm building with plenty to eat, and can look at it through the window, it is a rare treat.
Poets swap their favourite bits of snow-po.The one by Michael Laskey, for example, ‘Nobody’ (‘a whole / day of snow nobody’s trodden’). Or Wallace Stevens (‘One must have a mind of winter’) or Edna St Vincent Millay (‘… close to earth like mice we go / Under the horizontal snow’), or even Mary Oliver (‘…once again the storm has passed us by’).
But I’m going for Elinor Wylie, because she was once well known, seems to have got a little lost, and her snow poem, ‘Velvet Shoes’, made it into Walter de la Mare’s anthology, Come Hither which is where it found me. It is not her very best poem, but it must have something because crunching softly to the post office yesterday, I thought ‘velvet shoes’.
Velvet Shoes
Let us walk in the white snow
In a soundless space;
With footsteps quiet and slow,
At a tranquil pace,
Under veils of white lace.
I shall go shod in silk,
And you in wool,
White as white cow’s milk,
More beautiful
Than the breast of a gull.
We shall walk through the still town
In a windless peace;
We shall step upon white down,
Upon silver fleece,
Upon softer than these.
We shall walk in velvet shoes:
Wherever we go
Silence will fall like dews
On white silence below.
We shall walk in the snow.