In a Winter Landscape

I woke a few days ago to wonderful scenery of winter beauty; my world was covered in a thin layer of pure white snow, in the sky above the sun shone from a brilliant blue. This is the winter landscape from the world of Friedrick and Frost. From my window in the office my view is towards the snow-laden forest, I see the day pass by while I study the works of long-since-dead authors. In just a few days, the university will quiet down, and my evening contemplations be composed of music, tea and piles of books yet again.

As I walked home that evening I came to think about a poem by Robert Frost I had read a long time ago, well I only remembered the last few lines, but it seemed so fitting when I again entered my slumbering neighbourhood:

Over the snow my creaking feet
Disturbed the slumbering village street
Like profanation, by your leave,
At ten o'clock of a winter eve.

I spent today reading John Donne, his poetry of love and life is some of the most beautiful of the day. With lines such as "Goe, and catche a falling starre, Get with child a mandrake roote, Tell me where all past yeares are," from the poem Song, I long back to a world of those words, a world where proclamations of love could be written in verse of divine proportions and declared to all the world. If ever dreams were interrupted like this:

My Dreame thou brok'st not, but continued'st it,
Thou art so truth, that thoughts of thee suffice,
To make dreames truths; and fables histories;
Enter these armes, for since thou thoughtst it best,
Not to dreame all my dreame, let's act the rest.

I am only saddened that we rarely hear words spoken like this anymore.

Another poem I read today, and with which I will end this first winter thought, though not a winter poem, is from Petrarch:

A doe of purest white upon the grass
wearing two horns of gold appeared to me
between two streams beneath a laurel's shade
at sunrise in that season not yet ripe.

The sight of her was so sweetly austere
that I left all my work to follow her,
just like a miser who in search of treasure
with pleasure makes his effort bitterless.
"No one touch me," around her lovely neck
was written out in diamonds and in topaz,
"It pleased my Caesar to create me free."

The sun by now had climbed the sky midway,
my eyes were tired but not full from looking
when I fell into water, and she vanished.