London Snow

St. Sepulchre-without-Newgate: I failed to notice when taking this photograph that this street it stands on is Snow Hill!

Snow came to London today after a prelude of several days of freezing cold.  In the excitement I left my season ticket at home, so had to make the final part as well as the middle of my journey on foot (my eccentric route usually involves a bracing walk along the South Bank of the Thames), but I did not mind the walk of two miles in sunlight and snow.  So a rare and welcome excuse for this poem of Robert Bridges', a favourite of mine:

London Snow

When men were all asleep the snow came flying,

In large white flakes falling on the city brown,

Stealthily and perpetually settling and loosely lying,

Hushing the latest traffic of the drowsy town;

Deadening, muffling, stifling its murmurs failing;

Lazily and incessantly floating down and down:

Silently sifting and veiling road, roof and railing;

Hiding difference, making unevenness even,

Into angles and crevices softly drifting and sailing.

All night it fell, and when full inches seven

It lay in the depth of its uncompacted lightness,

The clouds blew off from a high and frosty heaven;

And all woke earlier for the unaccustomed brightness

Of the winter dawning, the strange unheavenly glare:

The eye marvelled – marvelled at the dazzling whiteness;

The ear hearkened to the stillness of the solemn air;

No sound of wheel rumbling nor of foot falling,

And the busy morning cries came thin and spare.

Then boys I heard, as they went to school, calling,

They gathered up the crystal manna to freeze

Their tongues with tasting, their hands with snowballing;

Or rioted in a drift, plunging up to the knees;

Or peering up from under the white-mossed wonder,

‘O look at the trees!’ they cried, ‘O look at the trees!’

With lessened load a few carts creak and blunder,

Following along the white deserted way,

A country company long dispersed asunder:

When now already the sun, in pale display

Standing by Paul’s high dome, spread forth below

His sparkling beams, and awoke the stir of the day.

For now doors open, and war is waged with the snow;

And trains of sombre men, past tale of number,

Tread long brown paths, as toward their toil they go:

But even for them awhile no cares encumber

Their minds diverted; the daily word is unspoken,

The daily thoughts of labour and sorrow slumber

At the sight of the beauty that greets them, for the charm they have broken.

St. Pancras Station (left) and the British Library (right)

Lines from this poem come to me fairly often, generally à propos of nothing in particular and even in high summer; in fact, it contains some of my favourite lines of poetry.  'All night it fell, and when full inches seven / It lay in the depth of its uncompacted lightness, / The clouds blew off from a high and frosty heaven', ... 'the unaccustomed brightness'... 'past tale of number'.  'Paul's high dome' is a line that murmurs comes to me almost every time I walk to work along the S Bank.    'Stealthily and perpetually settling and loosely lying' is delicious, and notice the harmonious juxtaposition of 'stealthily' and 'perpetually', one with a Germanic root and the other derived from Latin; it is also evidence of Bridges' efforts, for musicality's sake, to purge his English poetry of sibilance (this is why he employed so often the older third-person singular conjugation, -eth or -th).  In general, the apparently irregular rhythm, the slight breathlessness of excitement, is one effect of Bridges' quantitative verse, which involves measuring a line by the length of syllables, rather than the stress placed upon them.  Catherine Phillips explains all this in her interesting biography of Bridges, which I read cover-to-cover about three years ago.

Sunlight and snow become London rather well, I think, just as they did in Bridges' time.

Regent Square