Is it snowing where you are? It’s snowing here – drifts and drifts of it – snow & snow & snow. Someone said to me in passing, “8 inches of snow expected.” Did she mean 8 MORE inches? I felt thrilled and alarmed – my personal weather forecast: snow, with 100% belief in more snow.
Which lead me to stumble upon this phrase on Weather Underground: Cooperative Observer Snowfall Data. The scientific table isn’t fancy, just a list of locations and numbers – but what a title. As in, here we all are, each doing our part, cooperatively watching the snow fall, collecting with our senses the necessary data.
And isn’t that what poets do? (Some of it, anyway.) Each poet doing his or her part to pay attention, collecting data from whatever far-flung region (external or internal) – then compiling those observations into some new form, from which others might glean what they need. I know I’d like to be on the Cooperative Observer Snowfall team, at any rate.
But like writing poetry, observing snowfall probably sounds a lot easier than it is. First of all, it’s cold out there – freezing. There’s a lot to make you miserable, and the job requires you to really get out in it, stay there, and measure carefully. As Wallace Stevens observes in his classic poem “The Snow Man”:
[One must] have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves…
To observe what is really there requires getting beyond our own discomforts and preconceptions – a willingness to spend time, to be cold, to be empty. When we are no longer deafened by our own misery projected into a few last, wind-rasped leaves, we have the opportunity to experience those stunning “spruces rough in the distant glitter.” To do this, “One must have a mind of winter,” as the poem’s opening line states – a phrase that repeatedly goes through my mind as I move through this snow-filled landscape.
Yet truly, an actual winter full of ice and snow can be as brutal as it is beautiful. I think of the image of those ice-bent birches, permanently misshapen from the weight of so much winter, in Robert Frost’s poem “Birches” –
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
So low for long, they never right themselves:
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry them in the sun.
And it’s true – all that snowfall has a weight: physical, emotional. Sometimes it can even feel as if the world is ending: “such heaps of broken glass to sweep away, / You’d think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.”
And almost as if to save itself from freezing – from being permanently bent low by winter and the knowledge of the ice on the trees – the mind of Frost’s poem chooses to reach beyond winter. He imagines an alternate reason for the birches’ broken forms: “I like to think some boy’s been swinging them” – and this thought takes the mind back to boyhood and the warmer climes of memory. The imagination creates an escape from winter for a moment, an alternate reality: “So was I once myself a swinger of birches. And so I dream of going back to be.”
Fair enough. We might read this as a kind of hypothermic fantasy – the mind hallucinating warmth even as the cold deepens. However, Frost’s poem doesn’t end there. The speaker’s thoughts return to life and its trouble, “weary of considerations, / [when] life is too much like a pathless wood / …and one eye is weeping/ From a twig’s having lashed across it open.” At which point the image of the winter birch returns – this time as a means of escape and perspective from the mind’s own miseries:
I’d like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
. . .
I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven…
For a cosmic-twinkly reenactment of this poem excerpt, check out this video:
But Frost’s poem (unlike the video), hastens to reminds us that escape isn’t the ultimate desire – though it may serve as a kind of relief. Like Joni Mitchell wishing she had a river she could skate away on – longing for a mind of winter in the midst of a too-green California December and love gone awry:
Joni says she wants a river so long she can teach her feet to fly, escaping the weight of her sadness as well as her immediate, too-cheerful surroundings. As listeners we know that that escape would only be temporary – or else a kind of death, leaving this world – but the sense of winter departure provides an understandable reprieve.
In the same way, Frost wishes to get away from earth awhile – but ultimately still wishes to return, for “Earth’s the right place for love: / I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.” Yet entering into winter with the mind of winter can help one bear the weight.
* * * * *
Now might be a good time to gauge your personal snow depth (inside or outside). For example, in Eden (Vermont) – just up the road a ways from here – they’ve got 16 inches, with 3-1/2 inches expected in the next 24-hours. Pretty good, Eden. I imagine the apples are still ripe under all that snow, and the snake’s hibernating under the floorboards of someone’s barn.