Snowdrop
Now is the globe shrunk tight
Round the mouse’s dulled wintering heart.
Weasel and crow, as if moulded in brass,
Move through an outer darkness
Not in their right minds,
With the other deaths. She, too, pursues her ends,
Brutal as the stars of this month,
Her pale head heavy as metal.
This is a concise yet highly effective depiction of winter. The octet is as withering
and shrunken as the tableau he describes.
Time is frozen in Hughes’ recreation: the ‘dulled’ heart of the mouse reduced in
scale and temperature to accommodate cryogenic inertia. But the sense of
foreboding, enacted in the disorientated but implacable impulses of the weasels
and crows who move in shadows, is reinforced by a muffled suggestion of
Richard III’s ‘Now is the winter’, as though the animals were the harbingers of
discontent.
And in this ominous terrain, we imagine light as spectral, even the light of the
relentless snowdrop in a forest of sterility and darkness.
Now is the globe shrunk tight
Round the mouse’s dulled wintering heart.
Weasel and crow, as if moulded in brass,
Move through an outer darkness
Not in their right minds,
With the other deaths. She, too, pursues her ends,
Brutal as the stars of this month,
Her pale head heavy as metal.
This is a concise yet highly effective depiction of winter. The octet is as withering
and shrunken as the tableau he describes.
Time is frozen in Hughes’ recreation: the ‘dulled’ heart of the mouse reduced in
scale and temperature to accommodate cryogenic inertia. But the sense of
foreboding, enacted in the disorientated but implacable impulses of the weasels
and crows who move in shadows, is reinforced by a muffled suggestion of
Richard III’s ‘Now is the winter’, as though the animals were the harbingers of
discontent.
And in this ominous terrain, we imagine light as spectral, even the light of the
relentless snowdrop in a forest of sterility and darkness.
