Snowstorms

Recent snowstorms reminded me of this poem.

Snowstorm in the Midwest
James Wright

Though haunches of whales
Slope into whitecap doves, 
It is hard to drown here.

Between two walls,
A fold of echoes,
A girl’s voice walks naked.

I step into the water
Of two flakes.
The crowns of white birds rise
To my ankles,
To my knees, 
To my face.

Escaping in silence
From locomotive and smoke, 
I hunt the huge feathers of gulls
And the fountains of hills,
I hunt the sea, to walk on the waters.

A splayed starling
Follows me down a long stairway
Of white sand.

The tone here, as with so many of James Wright’s poems, is soft, welcoming, tender even; there’s a quiet hush to it like the snowy weather itself.  It belongs with Frost’s classic, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” and Frost’s remarkable line, “The only other sounds the sweep/Of easy wind and downy flake,” is hiding somewhere inside of Wright’s lines.  Maybe it’s a nod to Frost, or maybe it springs from the landscape, the event, or even just the sibilant sound of the word “snow” itself.  

As with so many of James Wright’s poems, I feel as if I’m reading in another language here—one of pure metaphor.  The title alone, “Snowstorm in the Midwest,” is about the only “real” thing we encounter.

The poem establishes its reliance on metaphor in those first lines, that first response to the literal title, as “haunches of whales/Slope into whitecap doves”—a transformation first of the snow into the immense whale haunches, then those enormous, curving things becoming a massive wave of doves.  Through all of this magic and enormity, still “it is impossible to drown here,” that line bringing us back to the more literal scene—the snowstorm.  The storm is grand and vast, and the language of the poem has tried to equal that, but both are transforming something into something else.  Snow isn’t water, though it’s made of water.  Those aren’t whale haunches and doves, though they may well need to become these to get at the significance of this event…. 

We are then instantly swept back into the purely metaphoric: “between two walls,/A fold of echoes.”  Here Wright reaches to somehow put into words not just the visual effect of the storm, its enormity—whale haunches, masses of doves—but also the sound of it.  “A fold of echoes” takes something auditory, “echoes,” and mixes in the visual, “a fold.”  Since an echo is already a kind of “fold,” in that it sends sounds back on themselves, this suggests something doubly “folded,” and surely addresses the muted, unmistakable but indescribable hush of a snowstorm.  But it is also something else, that sound, something “between” those folding/folded echoes—“A girl’s voice walks naked.”  That line gets me every time.  It’s so perfect; it somehow manages to say something to us that if we linger long enough on it becomes both more mysterious and more graspable in the same instant.  It could be Wright’s hearing an actual voice out in the storm, and amidst the enormous visual and auditory hush of the moment it feels stripped bare, stripped down to its raw essence in comparison. The storm undresses us, even stripping away that which embellishes (covers up/shields/protects) our human voices, allowing us to hear something more fundamental, essential.    

Then the poet “steps into the water of two flakes,” an image both impossible to envision and one that like the opening leap into metaphor simply seems right.  We move from the enormous whale haunches, the echoing folds of sound, that small, naked voice, to the minute snowflakes which have themselves been transformed, like everything else in Wright’s account of the storm.  He is moving out into it physically now just as the poem has stepped out into the snowstorm, and is itself a storm of richly metaphorical words.  And he is engulfed by it, the “crowns of white birds” accumulating around him, covering him from foot to head—snow, his own words, the poem. He envisions this all as an “escaping in silence / from locomotives and smoke.”  Perhaps here he is addressing the grim realities of industrial Ohio he so often references in his work, his longing to break free of it, his poetry his escape, the “silence” of poetic expression.…  And it is a spiritual quest; he hopes to, like Christ, even, walk on the waters (which you are doing, in a sense, when you walk on snow).  

The miracle for Wright, for the reader, is how this turbulent, strikingly beautiful moment of natural beauty becomes so important, so essential.  As he moves out through those echoing walls and great haunches “hunting the feathers of gulls…hunting the sea,” a “splayed starling”—spreading its wings in the rush of wind, weather “follows me down a long stairway/of white sand.”  I envision this as a “real” bird, fluttering in the storm, spreading its wings. Wright imagining it as following him out into the heart of the storm suggests he sees himself as an integral part of this natural landscape devoid of people, just him, his far-reaching words, a lone, small starling following along on his poetic, spiritual, necessary quest.  

As more “bad” weather is sure to come along this winter, this poem serves, for me, as a reminder to step out into the world, to celebrate its power and enormity, to let it help stir up our own storms of words, like so many small flakes that may, if we’re lucky, accumulate and pull us in.

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