Snow

Norfolk roads have been made beautiful and unfamiliar by the snow. No, that should be 'beautiful but unfamiliar'. The beauty of Norfolk lies in being Norfolk. But snow neutralises. I drive down lanes overhung with branches bending under the white weight that could be in Russia or Scandinavia. It's thrilling but wrong. One of the most perfect poems I know was written about this strange nothingness of snow. Here it is.

The Snow Man

by Wallace Stevens

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And 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,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.