At some point yesterday, I said something like, “I’m not sure what I’m going to write about tomorrow with my Dickinson post.”
My wife said, “How about how many times she mentioned ‘snow’?’”
Well, there you go! Snow!
When you search “snow” on the online Dickinson archive, 141 entries pop up representing 57 different poems – plus, in one poem (“I taste a liquor never brewed”), Dickinson used the word “snowy” (the final stanza of that poem reads, “Till Seraphs swing their snowy Hats / And Saints – to windows run / To see the little Tippler / Leaning against the – Sun!).
I thought today, though, I’d share a “snow” poem – one of my favorites of Dickinson’s “snow” poems – but it never uses the word “snow.” Instead, Mabel Loomis Todd titled the poem “The Snow” in the second series of Dickinson’s poems published in 1891. The poem is “It sifts from leaden sieves.”
Some of the images I love in this poem: lines 3 & 4, the Alabaster wool what fills “The wrinkles of the Road”; line 12, the Celestial Vail, as well as the third stanza’s image of “Summer’s empty Room” and how the “Acres of Joints” are now “recordless”; line 17, “It Ruffles Writs of Posts” (“As Ankles of a Queen) – and that final image how “like Ghosts,” the snow covers all, “Denying they have been.
What image(s) speak to you?
My wife said, “How about how many times she mentioned ‘snow’?’”
Well, there you go! Snow!
When you search “snow” on the online Dickinson archive, 141 entries pop up representing 57 different poems – plus, in one poem (“I taste a liquor never brewed”), Dickinson used the word “snowy” (the final stanza of that poem reads, “Till Seraphs swing their snowy Hats / And Saints – to windows run / To see the little Tippler / Leaning against the – Sun!).
I thought today, though, I’d share a “snow” poem – one of my favorites of Dickinson’s “snow” poems – but it never uses the word “snow.” Instead, Mabel Loomis Todd titled the poem “The Snow” in the second series of Dickinson’s poems published in 1891. The poem is “It sifts from leaden sieves.”
Some of the images I love in this poem: lines 3 & 4, the Alabaster wool what fills “The wrinkles of the Road”; line 12, the Celestial Vail, as well as the third stanza’s image of “Summer’s empty Room” and how the “Acres of Joints” are now “recordless”; line 17, “It Ruffles Writs of Posts” (“As Ankles of a Queen) – and that final image how “like Ghosts,” the snow covers all, “Denying they have been.
What image(s) speak to you?
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