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“If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ode to the West Wind.
Oh, yes. Yes, it can, Mr Percy Bysshe ‘If I were a swift cloud’ Shelley. It can be so far behind that it stretches the limits of imagination. Spring can be so far behind that if you stand on this country road and scream out your resentment of Winter in sonnet form, it will have turned to free verse before Spring arrives.
It’s all very fine to talk about ‘wingèd seeds’ being charioted ‘to their dark wintry bed’ until their ‘azure sister of the Spring’ finally hauls her verdant ass along, but right now in rural Western Pennsylvania it’s brutally fucking cold and ain’t no flowery analogy gonna warm us up or check the astonishing flow of snot running out our noses.
But I’ll give you ‘the dreaming earth.’ I can look out across this arctic horizon and feel it’s dreaming. And I’ll give you the ‘steep sky’s commotion’ and the ‘loose clouds like Earth’s decaying leaves’ because as cold as it is, there’s a savage beauty at work here, and it can take your breath as quickly as the cold. But I’ll trade your ‘bright hair…of some fierce Maenad’ for a fat woolen scarf and a pair of really warm gloves.
Blog photograph copyrighted to the photographer and used with permission by utata.org. All photographs used on utata.org are stored on flickr.com and are obtained via the flickr API. Text is copyrighted to the author, greg fallis and is used with permission by utata.org. Please see Show and Share Your Work
