Snow on snow

Here is William Diaper in 1722, translating Oppian’s Halieuticks (a Greek epic poem on the loves of the fishes):

As when soft Snows, brought down by
Western Gales,
Silent descend and spread on all the Vales . . .
Nature bears all one Face, looks coldly bright,
And mourns her lost Variety in White.
Unlike themselves the Objects glare around,
And with false Rays the dazzled Sight
confound.

Lost variety is the nub: before it is anything else, snow is Nature’s alienation-effect, making all things look the same and ‘unlike themselves’ — even while we watch, or else behind our backs, noiselessly. But snow also carries contrary meanings: an image of sameness, and equally of variousness and flux, of a reality that is ‘incorrigibly plural’ in the words of Louis MacNeice’s ‘Snow’.

Marcus Sedgwick has written a memoir of snow, touching on aspects of its glittering dualism. He should know, for he inhabits the Haute Savoie, in the French Alps, where the snow can arrive in October and still be falling in May. His book is short and surprisingly digressive, partly because Sedgwick is a presence at many of its turns. His approach is personal. This is a difficulty, because snow refuses to be rallied under any other banner than its own. It resists thought, while seeming like a figure of thought in action. We watch snow as we watch no other natural event, and it feels like looking inwards, as contentless as introspection. Snow makes us think of nothing but snow, even if this nothing can seem like everything. Think of Robert Frost’s solitary figure stopping on his way home, on the darkest evening of the year, to stare motivelessly at his neighbour’s field: ‘He will not see me stopping here/ To watch his woods fill up with snow.