200

I wondered what I should do for my two hundredth post but it appears nature has done that for me.

With loitering step and quiet eye,

Beneath the low November sky,

I wandered in the woods, and found

A clearing where the broken ground

Was scattered with black stumps and briers,

And the old wreck of forest fires.

(“In November”, Archibald Lampman)

One must have a mind of winter

To regard the frost and boughs

Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time

To behold the junipers shagged with ice,

The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think

Of any misery in the sound of the wind,

In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land

Full of the same wind

That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,

And, nothing himself, beholds

Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

(“The Snow Man”, Wallace Stevens)

Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village though;

He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow.

(“Stopping By the Woods On a Snowy Evening”, Robert Frost)

Never we know but in sleet and in snow,

The place where the great fires are,

That the midst of the earth is a raging mirth,

And the heart of the earth a star.

(“A Child of the Snows”, G.K. Chesterton)