A walk in the snow literature.
“Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland,” observes Gabriel Conroy, in the mysterious and tender final paragraph of James Joyce’s story “The Dead.”
Gabriel has returned from a party to his hotel room, overcome with desire for his wife, Gretta, only to find that she is preoccupied with thoughts of a boy she once loved. Haunted by ghosts of the past, and feeling inadequate beside the image of young passion—the boy succumbed to an illness after standing outside Gretta’s window in the rain—Gabriel turns in bed to the window. There he sees the snow, “thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones”:
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.
I think of this passage anytime there’s a snowstorm. Though it may be a hazard or a nuisance for some, others of us, I suspect, will always be drawn to the window to swoon over falling snow.
When we do, what are our minds apprehending, exactly? Is it the sense, hinted at by Joyce, of being connected to all the people and places touched by the same storm? Or is it the snowfall’s ghostly peace and purity—just uncommon enough in our calendar that, like a religious holiday, it prompts us to reflect on ultimate things?
My mother has a conviction that more people die in winter than in any other season. While I don’t think that’s statistically supported, it happens to be true that, over the past several years of my life, death has been particularly prominent in winter, taking some people close to me, others more tangentially connected. It may be that, in a time of year when family and friends tend to gather, we feel the new absences more profoundly. Or perhaps the explanation is astrophysical: amid shorter days, more darkness means more ghosts?
If winter is a season of loss, then snow is a fitting embodiment of it, making the known world suddenly unfamiliar. The British poet and novelist Thomas Hardy, unsurpassed in his projections of feeling onto landscapes and the weather, once used snowfall as a metaphor for the infinitesimal slide from vitality to age. In the poem “A Light Snow-Fall after Frost,” he deftly portrays two figures on a snowy road, one with a “ruddy beard,” the other with “whitening hairs.” The question—when does the one become the other?—is all but asked in the concluding stanza:
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.
Other writers have lighted on this image of accruing snow. The Palestinian-American poet Naomi Shihab Nye, in her poem “Snow,” recalls taking her brother sledding as a child to escape an unnamed tragedy at home. She describes dragging him up a snow bank, letting him go, and shouting after him, “as if we were having fun.” Then, suddenly, she leaps to the present day, offering a stunning reflection:
That was the deepest
I ever went into the snow. Now I think of it
when I stare at paper or into silences
between human beings. The drifting
accumulation. A father goes months
without speaking to his son.
But it isn’t only loss or coldness that accumulates in falling snow. It may also be peace, or innocence, as in the poem “The Snow Fairy,” by the Harlem Renaissance poet Claude McKay. In what later becomes an image of ephemeral love, McKay records “Snow-fairies falling, falling from the sky”:
As though in heaven there was revolt and riot,
And they, frail things had taken panic flight
Down to the calm earth seeking peace and quiet.
I wonder if, when we pause to admire the snowfall, we hear echoes of these and other writers—not the poems and stories themselves, which may be unfamiliar, but some essential property or properties each writer has caught a piece of.
I suppose it’s also possible to make too much of snow. As I write this, I can see through my window a torn-up patch of yesterday’s deposit, framed by salt stains on one side, black sludge on the other. Not much there to swoon home about.
Maybe you’re the sort of person who can’t wait for the snow to melt and for spring to come. Even then, the poets have you. Consider this last piece, “First Sight,” by the great British poet Philip Larkin, about lambs born in the “vast unwelcome” of snowy winter:
As they wait beside the ewe,
Her fleeces wetly caked, there lies
Hidden round them, waiting too,
Earth’s immeasurable surprise.
They could not grasp it if they knew,
What so soon will wake and grow
Utterly unlike the snow.
