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Tuesday
Snow, which has been hammering much of the country (including Iowa City and Madison, where two of my brothers live), finally came to Tennessee. With Mary Oliver, who is also describing her “First Snow” of the year,
The snow
began here
this morning and all day
continued, it’s white
rhetoric everywhere…
Oliver sees the snow as a kind of “rhetoric”— the art of effective communication—because it asks of us foundational or existential questions. She says the loveliness
call[s] us back to why, how,
whence such beauty and what
the meaning…
The snowfall asks its oracular questions not calmly but feverishly, with a flowing energy that never seems to ebb. Only deep in the night, in the immense silence following the storm–when the broad fields “smolder with light” and “the heavens hold a million candles”–does there seem to be time to ask whether the questions have been answered.
And the answer to that is yes and no. There is no traditional answer as we normally understand it. And yet, a landscape with trees that “glitter like castles of ribbons” “feels like one.”
First Snow
By Mary Oliver
The snow
began here
this morning and all day
continued, it’s white
rhetoric everywhere
calling us back to why, how,
whence such beauty and what
the meaning; such
an oracular fever! flowing
past windows, an energy it seemed
would never ebb, never settle
less than lovely! and only now,
deep into night,
it has finally ended.
The silence
is immense,
and the heavens still hold
a million candles; nowhere
the familiar things:
stars, the moon,
the darkness we expect
and nightly turn from. Trees
glitter like castles
of ribbons, the broad fields
smolder with light, a passing
creekbed lies
heaped with shining hills;
and though the questions
that have assailed us all day
remain—not a single
answer has been found—
walking out now
into the silence and the light
under the trees,
and through the fields,
feels like one.
As Christians are in their Epiphany season, I considered using this poem this past Sunday. The Christmas message is one of renewal, a promise of new beginnings where we can walk out “into the silence and the light under the trees, and through the fields.”