Snow Poems by Thomas Hardy

Snow in the Suburbs

Every branch big with it,

Bent every twig with it;

Every fork like a white web-foot;

Every street and pavement mute:

Some flakes have lost their way, and grope back upward, when

Meeting those meandering down they turn and descend again.

The palings are glued together like a wall,

And there is no waft of wind with the fleecy fall.

A sparrow enters the tree,

Whereon immediately

A snow-lump thrice his own slight size

Descends on him and showers his head and eyes,

And overturns him,

And near inurns him,

And lights on a nether twig, when its brush

Starts off a volley of other lodging lumps with a rush.

The steps are a blanched slope,

Up which, with feeble hope,

A black cat comes, wide-eyed and thin;

And we take him in.

A Light Snow-Fall after Frost

On the flat road a man at last appears:

How much his whitening hairs

Owe to the settling snow’s mute anchorage,

And how much to a life’s rough pilgrimage,

One cannot certify.

The frost is on the wane,

And cobwebs hanging close outside the pane

Pose as festoons of thick white worsted there,

Of their pale presence no eye being aware

Till the rime made them plain.

A second man comes by;

His ruddy beard brings fire to the pallid scene:

His coat is faded green;

Hence seems it that his mien

Wears something of the dye

Of the berried holm-trees that he passes nigh.

The snow-feathers so gently swoop that though

But half an hour ago

The road was brown, and now is starkly white,

A watcher would have failed defining quite

When it transformed it so.

(Near Surbiton)

Winter Night in Woodland

(Old Time)

The bark of a fox rings, sonorous and long: –

Three barks, and then silentness; ‘wong, wong, wong!’

In quality horn-like, yet melancholy,

As from teachings of years; for an old one is he.

The hand of all men is against him, he knows; and yet, why?

That he knows not, – will never know, down to his death-halloo cry.

With clap-nets and lanterns off start the bird-baiters,

In trim to make raids on the roosts in the copse,

Where they beat the boughs artfully, while their awaiters

Grow heavy at home over divers warm drops.

The poachers, with swingels, and matches of brimstone, outcreep

To steal upon pheasants and drowse them a-perch and asleep.

Out there, on the verge, where a path wavers through,

Dark figures, filed singly, thrid quickly the view,

Yet heavily laden: land-carriers are they

In the hire of the smugglers from some nearest bay.

Each bears his two ‘tubs’, slung across, one in front, one behind,

To a further snug hiding, which none but themselves are to find.

And then, when the night has turned twelve the air brings

From dim distance, a rhythm of voices and strings:

’Tis the quire, just afoot on their long yearly rounds,

To rouse by worn carols each house in their bounds;

Robert Penny, the Dewys, Mail, Voss, and the rest; till anon

Tired and thirsty, but cheerful, they home to their beds in the dawn.

Ice on the Highway

Seven buxom women abreast, and arm in arm,

Trudge down the hill, tip-toed,

And breathing warm;

They must perforce trudge thus, to keep upright

On the glassy ice-bound road,

And they must get to market whether or no,

Provisions running low

With the nearing Saturday night,

While the lumbering van wherein they mostly ride

Can nowise go:

Yet loud their laughter as they stagger and slide!

(Yell’ham Hill)