A Winter Evening Poem

A Winter Landscape
by Mathilde Blind (1893)

All night, all day, in dizzy, downward flight,

Fell the wild-whirling, vague, chaotic snow,

Till every landmark of the earth below,

Trees, moorlands, roads, and each familiar sight

Were blotted out by the bewildering white.

And winds, now shrieking loud, now whimpering low,

Seemed lamentations for the world-old woe

That death must swallow life, and darkness light.

But all at once the rack was blown away,

The snowstorm hushing ended in a sigh;

Then like a flame the crescent moon on high

Leaped forth among the planets; pure as they,

Earth vied in whiteness with the Milky Way:

Herself a star beneath the starry sky.