Before we look at a very good
snow poem, by G.E. Murray,
here’s a picture La Kid
just took of UD‘s morning
handiwork: A path through the snow
from our house to the street.
(She took it through a window,
etc., etc., so it’s a bit vague.)
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The poem is from his Sequels to an Uncollected Winter.
4. The Certainties
Kept animals stray in the wind-driven snow twenty miles northwest
Out of Minneapolis, white-faced heifers each searching the eyes
Of the others, doomed. These distances blowing closed over roads
And county fences, emanate from the hardest parts of us like certainties.
At desolate junctures, hardly moving, a gunshot of breath signals
The residue of soul. On this barren, narrow towpath, the hung
Bellies of cows lunge through drifts forming whale tracks, inching
Ahead, the beasts hopeful as drifters at the hiring gate. Night-hammered,
Blizzard-ripe, we wait by the window with house plants, our fears
Nearly realized, a salt lick of faith turning to stone in our bowels.
Coon Rapids, Minnesota. January 1976
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Point One, pretty much all poets say the same thing about snow. Wind they’re divided about; rain can be new life or dreadful dullness, sunlight happiness or oppression… But snow for most is clearly death, the world whited out to reveal whether we like it or not “what’s really always there / Unresting death,” as Philip Larkin writes (not about snow, but same idea).
“All poems are elegies at their core, [Maxine Kumin] often said.”
So Murray’s poem, with its long lines drifting like the cattle, drifting like us into dangerous thoughts while we look at the snow, does that same death thing, follows the snow as it snakes toward a truth about the certainty of our oblivion. We’re kept animals, set adrift by the weather in the direction of morbid thoughts. The real animals, sad things, are indeed adrift, doomed to starve or freeze as they wander; we are figuratively driven from warm complacent ordinary thoughts by what’s happening outside. We get to stay in – truly kept animals – and from our windows watch the merest “residue of soul” that shows itself in expelled breath. And this tells us how at any moment we are, whatever the weather, barely existent, hanging on by a thread.
the hung
Bellies of cows lunge through drifts forming whale tracks, inching
Ahead, the beasts hopeful as drifters at the hiring gate.
Hung and lunge: This is an unrhymed but lightly metered poem with plenty of internal rhyme or near rhyme. Its mood is the ominous feel of being unmoored, so tight exact rhyme wouldn’t do; but on the other hand the poem’s not ultimately about random drift. It has both a nuanced parallel between animals and human beings to express, and a familiar trajectory to trace toward a familiar conclusion. So despite its snow drifts, the poem exhibits a certain solidity of form – all those long lines, more or less the same length.
The famous final paragraph of Joyce’s “The Dead” is the prose cousin of “The Certainties.”
A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, on the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
Murray writes:
Night-hammered,
Blizzard-ripe, we wait by the window with house plants, our fears
Nearly realized, a salt lick of faith turning to stone in our bowels.
Wonderful final lines, pulling forward the parallel with the beasts. We wake up having been hammered all night with snow, and we wait by the window with house plants and I ask myself why is house plants so brilliant? Why is that little phrase the genius, the elegiac core of this poem? Why in the world does it make me think of that song from Hair that starts
We starve, look at one another, short of breath
Walking proudly in our winter coats
I guess it’s one of those existential status lines – We, we, we. Let us look starkly, in the clarifying snow, at us, the human race, in a corporate, spiritual, sense. Our fragility, isolation, transience, efforts to continue to exist. Our cattle-like hopefulness despite our doom… On we walk, proudly, in our winter coats, despite gasping, starving…
The house plants are the perfect pathos-example. The poignant pathetic way we bring small doses of nature in, keep these teeny therapeutic helpings warm so they thrive. Kept things for kept us. They keep our delusions of safety alive. Except that now, with so much snow, our fears are very close to realized.