John Berryman's
Winter Landscape
The print of his passage over a white page
summons again the hounds, the folded wings
and the cold hill of hunters coming down
through dwindling trees, never to reach again
the skaters, workers, watchers of their town.
Those trinal peaks he will not recognize
where decades past the snowfields broke and fell
with gunfire echoes ringing his cold dreams.
He does not show us this lone man on the bridge
who stops with his dark burden as one crow flies,
and beyond Bruegel steps to the rim and waves.
Virginia Hamilton Adair
The Hunters in the Snow
The three men coming down the winter hill
In brown, with tall poles and a pack of hounds
At heel, through the arrangement of the trees,
Past the five figures at the burning straw,
Returning cold and silent to their town,
Returning to the drifted snow, the rink
Lively with children, to the older men,
The long companions they can never reach,
The blue light, men with ladders, by the church
The sledge and shadow in the twilit street
Are not aware that in the sandy time
To come, the evil waste of history
Outstretched, they will be seen upon the brow
Of that same hill, when all their company
Will have been irrevocably lost,
These men, this particular three in brown
Witnessed by birds, will keep the scene and say
By their configuration with the trees,
The small bridge, the red houses and the fire,
What place, what time, what morning occasion
Sent them into the woods, a pack of hounds
At heel and the tall poles on their shoulders,
Thence to return as now we see them and
Ankle-deep in snow down the winter hill
Descend, while three birds watch and the fourth flies.
John Berryman
Brueghel's Winter
Jagg'd mountain peaks and skies ice-green
Wall in the wild cold scene below.
Churches, farms, bare copse, the sea
In freezing quiet of winter show;
Where ink-black shapes on fields in flood
Curling, skating, and sliding go.
To left a gabled tavern, a blaze;
Peasants; a watching child; and lo,
Muffled, mute--beneath naked trees
In sharp perspective, set a-row--
Trudge huntsmen, sinister spears aslant,
Dogs snuffling behind them in the snow;
And arrowlike, lean, athwart the air
Swoops into space a crow.
But flame, nor ice, nor piercing rock,
Nor silence, as of a frozen sea,
Nor that slant inward infinite line
Of signboard, bird, and hill, and tree,
Give more than subtle hint of him
Who squandered here life's mystery.
Walter de la Mare
("squandered," in the final line, has the older sense of "scattered")
The Hunters in the Snow
The over-all picture is winter
icy mountains
in the background the return
from the hunt it is toward evening
from the left
sturdy hunters lead in
their pack the inn-sign
hanging from a
broken hinge is a stag a crucifix
between his antlers the cold
inn yard is
deserted but for a huge bonfire
that flares wind-driven tended by
women who cluster
about it to the right beyond
the hill is a pattern of skaters
Brueghel the painter
concerned with it all has chosen
a winter-struck bush for his
foreground to
complete the picture.
William Carlos Williams
.
