Friday Poetry Blogging

Okay...maybe it's because I had a harrowing trip to work this morning through an unexpected, unpredicted snowstorm -- one that's supposed to turn into freezing rain, just when I have to be at the printer's office in a city 20 miles down the highway -- but this poem seemed particularly apropos, if not particularly cheery, this morning:

The Archangel Winter

In the dread circle hemmed by glaciers,
Pallid waste where no radiant fathomers,
Columbuses or Gamas, ever pass,
In realms of dingy gloom and deep crevasse
Seized from creation by nonentity,
Beyond ice floe and berg and ice-bound sea,
Deep in the fog that quenches every ray,
In stone waves and rock waters, far from day,
Amid the gloom, there, on the pole, stands black
Archangel Winter, darkness on his back
And trumpet at his lips; nor does he cast
One flash of eye, or blow one clarion-blast;
He never even dreams, being sheer snow;
The winged winds, captives of that age-old foe
Silence, are in his hand—birds in a snare;
His sightless eyes horribly watch the air;
Hoarfrost is in his bones and on his head,
And he is swathed in ever-petrified dread;
He terrifies the Vast, he seems so wild;
He is harsh, dismal, ice—that is, exiled;
The earth beneath his feet, in its dark cape,
Is dumb; he is the mute white stony shape
Set on that tomb in the eternal night;
Never does any motion, sound, or light
Brush the lone giant in that somber pall.
But when, on the timepieces that we call
Stars, the last day, endless and centerless,
Will sound, then the Lord's face will luminesce
And melt the spirit; his mouth will distend
Suddenly, in a savage, dreadful bend,
And the worlds—skiffs rudderless, rolling on—
Will hear the storm-blast of his clarion.
-- Victor Hugo