Ink froze.

The coldest day that I remember recording, clear and bright, but very high wind, blowing the snow. Ink froze. 

Thoreau's Journal

23-Jan-1857

Song for a Winter's Night

The lamp is burning low upon my table top
The snow is softly falling
The air is still in the silence of my room
I hear your voice softly calling.

If I could only have you near
To breathe a sigh or two
I would be happy just to hold the hands I love
On this winter night with you. . . .


The fire is dying now, my lamp is growing dim
The shades of night are lifting
The morning light steals across my windowpane
Where webs of snow are drifting.

 

If I could only have you near, to breathe a sigh or two
I would be happy just to hold the hands I love
And to once again be with you
On this winter night with you.


Gordon Lightfoot

An Arundel Tomb

An Arundel Tomb by dyhecht

These are the tombs of Earl Richard Fitzalan (1306-1376) and Countess Eleanor de Lancaster (1318-1372), who are currently believed to be my 22nd (via Richard) & 23rd (via Alice) & 24th (via Joan) great-grandparents. Today, the 5th day of February, is the anniversary of the day they married . . . in 1345 . . . at Ditton Church in Buckinghamshire, England.



An Arundel Tomb

Side by side, their faces blurred,
The earl and countess lie in stone,
Their proper habits vaguely shown
As jointed armour, stiffened pleat,
And that faint hint of the absurd -
The little dogs under their feet.

Such plainness of the pre-baroque
Hardly involves the eye, until
It meets his left-hand gauntlet, still
Clasped empty in the other; and
One sees, with a sharp tender shock,
His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.

They would not think to lie so long.
Such faithfulness in effigy
Was just a detail friends would see:
A sculptor's sweet commissioned grace
Thrown off in helping to prolong
The Latin names around the base.

They would not guess how early in
Their supine stationary voyage
The air would change to soundless damage,
Turn the old tenantry away;
How soon succeeding eyes begin
To look, not read. Rigidly, they

Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths
Of time. Snow fell, undated. Light
Each summer thronged the glass. A bright
Litter of birdcalls strewed the same
Bone-riddled ground. And up the paths
The endless altered people came,

Washing at their identity.
Now, helpless in the hollow of
An unarmorial age, a trough
Of smoke in slow suspended skeins
Above their scrap of history,
Only an attitude remains:

Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.
Phillip Larkin