When after weeks of winter rains
The foggy air hangs chill and wet,
When misted are the window-panes,
And walls and sheets and cupboards sweat;
When chilblains itch in every shoe,
And the mind's furnished chambers too
Are damp and sodden through and through;
When meals are glum and shoulders ache,
No match will strike nor firewood blaze,
Fiddlestrings squeak and tempers break,
No robin sings and no hen lays;
When paths are pools, and noses pearled,
And cats in kitchen fenders curled
Dream of a happier, drier world;
Then suddenly, when least we think,
A bright wind breaks the mist, and there
The sun looks out above the brink
Of piled up clouds, stair over stair:
Glad then at heart are all live things,
Both small and great, on feet or wings,
Birds, boys and beggars, cats and kings.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Saturday, February 08, 2014
Winter Rains
R.C. Trevelyan, "Winter Rains," in Cambridge Poets 1914-1920. An Anthology Compiled by Edward Davison (Cambridge: W. Heffer & Sons, Ltd., 1920), p. 189: