Yesterday's "best winter poem in English" post garnered a number of alternative suggestions, including poems by Frost, Pound, and O'Hara. And if nothing else, the yawning gap between the era of Shakespeare and the era of F, P, and O'H gives me pause. Aren't there any great 17th-, 18th-, or 19th-century winter poems?

When I grab my Portable Romantics and do a quick index search, all I come up with is Ralph Waldo Emerson's "The Snow-Storm." Not a great poem, but not awful, and blessedly short.

Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,

Arrives the snow, and driving o'er the fields,

Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air

Hides hills and woods, the river, and the heaven.

Now I'm checking The Making of a Sonnet, the most recent Norton anthology of the form, which includes poems from the 16th century to the present. This is the only obvious "cold," "snow," or "winter" item that surfaces in the index (other than "Yvor Winters," of course):

Cold Are the Crabs

Edward Lear

Cold are the crabs that crawl on yonder hills,

Colder the cucumbers that grow beneath,

And colder still the brazen chops that wreathe

          The tedious gloom of philosophic pills!

For when the tardy film of nectar fills

The ample bowls of demons and of men,

There lurks the feeble mouse, the homely hen,

          And there the porcupine with all her quills.

Yet much remains--to weave a solemn strain

That lingering sadly--slowly dies away,

Daily departing with departing day.

A pea-green gamut on a distant plain

When wily walruses in congress meet--

          Such such is life--

I'm not sure I've ever read a more sarcastic take on the ponderous Tennysonian form. The grammar and syntax are exquisite--all that subtle rhetorical repetition, etc. Lear merely substitutes ridiculous words for serious ones. The sonnet may be less insouciant than a Lewis Carroll verse, but diction-wise it's even cleverer. Carroll mocks bad poets. Lear mocks good ones.

And now off to "the snowy and the blowy, the blowy and the snowy," as Mr. Biswas would say. (I love Naipaul's A House for Mr. Biswas, which is certainly on my shortlist of sad-yet-funny books. Don't ask me what other books are on that list because I haven't thought of them yet.)