Poetry Friday: The round-up is here!

Welcome, Poetry Friday is here today!!!

Snowstorm! Blizzard!  Nor'easter!   All day, that is all I have heard.  My students were wild with excitement - sure that the morning would bring weather so bad that our half day would be a snow day instead.  We shall see.  In the meantime, I am imagining waking to this:

and experiencing something of the force of this winter poem:

The Snow-Storm

BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,

Arrives the snow, and, driving o'er the fields,

Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air

Hides hills and woods, the river, and the heaven,

And veils the farm-house at the garden's end.

The sled and traveller stopped, the courier's feet

Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit

Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed

In a tumultuous privacy of storm.

Come see the north wind's masonry.

Out of an unseen quarry evermore

Furnished with tile, the fierce artificer

Curves his white bastions with projected roof

Round every windward stake, or tree, or door.

Speeding, the myriad-handed, his wild work

So fanciful, so savage, nought cares he

For number or proportion. Mockingly,

On coop or kennel he hangs Parian wreaths;

A swan-like form invests the hidden thorn;

Fills up the farmer's lane from wall to wall,

Maugre the farmer's sighs; and, at the gate,

A tapering turret overtops the work.

And when his hours are numbered, and the world

Is all his own, retiring, as he were not,

Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art

To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone,

Built in an age, the mad wind's night-work,

The frolic architecture of the snow.

I will be on the road tomorrow, driving my youngest to the last of her college voice auditions...and hoping that the forecasters are right about the storm not affecting Pennsylvania at all...  Please leave your link and do stop in to share in the festival of poetry that is our weekly Poetry Friday.

At Radio, Rhythm & Rhyme, Matt is thinking snow storms, too...and all the work  that several inches of snow brings.