The Poetry Of Snow

Photo by Kathleen Tyler Conklin

Snow is beautiful, exciting, mysterious and sometimes treacherous. So is curiosity.

One man, Wilson Bentley (1865-1931) saw the beauty of snow, was fascinated by it and became curious about it.  As a young man, he was drawn to the natural world around him on his farm in Vermont.  He loved studying butterflies, leaves, raindrops, spider webs and snowflakes. Especially snowflakes,

Bentley devised a way to connect a microscope and a camera in order to photograph snowflakes. He stood for hours in the Vermont cold winter catching falling flakes and pushing them delicately with a feather onto the microscopic lens.

He photographed 5000 snow crystals this way over the course of his lifetime. Magically, every snowflake that he photographed was unique. He published photos of 2300 of these images in his book Snow Crystals and the Smithsonian Archives houses 500 of his photographs.

Ironically, he died from pneumonia after walking through a blizzard.

I read this story recently in The Washington Post and it reminded me how a curious mind responds to beauty. The intersection of science and art. Bentley’s curious mind appreciated and memorialized the unique beauty of the snowflake. His story inspired me to write this poem. 

                                              Snowfall

                                  Humans in some ways

                                  so alike

                                  predictable,

                                  we share our similarities

                                  hide our dissonances,

                                  alike at first glance

                                  and last chance.

                                  Like falling snow

                                  when examined deeply beneath

                                  our surface sameness---

                                  so different,

                                  as Bentley found

                                  when he captured each snowflake,

                                  memorized its uniqueness

                                  with his camera.

                                  Each of us perfectly unique

                                  as those white hexagons,

                                  when we allow

                                  our truth to fall up

                                  from our

                                  lovely, lonely center.

The Limits of Poetry

 

I am reading Edward Hirsch’s “How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry”.  It is his own Ode to poetry…a Hymn of praise…264 pages long.   It is a love letter to the poems that touch his heart, bring meaning to his life arouse his feelings and that enrich and comfort him. 

 

In 2011, Hirsch experienced the sudden loss of his son, Gabriel and found no solace in the poems that once impassioned his heart and quieted his mind. Gabriel, 22 years of age, died

from the club drug GHB that someone gave him at a party. It was a harrowing three days before Hirsch found out what had happened to his son. 

 

Father and son - Blois, France - Kathleen Tyler Conklin

Hirsch stopped reading and writing poetry after this traumatic shock.  But he began to record the memories of his son by talking with friends and relatives, writing them down compulsively and haphazardly.  After a while his outpouring of words began to take the shape of a poem.  It became a 70 page elegy to his son; a book length poem recently published called “Gabriel”.  The New Yorker called it a “masterpiece of sorrow”.

 

The poem is written in three-line stanzas without punctuation…a kind of stream of consciousness, a deluge of memories, love and grief.  Perhaps an effort to etch Gabriel’s spirit on the page...to bring him to life with words. Hirsch admits he put everything he could into his poem, but also had to face what poetry could not do.  His passion had been cooled by this tragedy.  He had a new awareness…that poetry has limits. “It cannot give us back the people we have lost.”

 

And yet, in a sense by writing this astounding elegy, Hirsch has given Gabriel to us.