Poet in Winter
A small room with one table and one chair, This man who writes, then cancels what he writes, Tears up the sheet, runs fingers through his hair; His violent longing makes a fiercer chill Than the sensed tilting of his hemisphere Toward the frozen solstice, and he fights A strange, oncoming ice-age of the will.
For him love does not burn, but chains him so: The unspoken words lie heavy on his tongue, Thoughts are like granite hurled into soft snow; He holds a winter landscape in his mind; All tracks, familiar roads are covered now 'By a blank sameness; he is caught and wrung In the mailed gauntlet of a polar wind.
And yet that wind blows only for the man Thus damned to strive; one opening the door Would see him there, and casually would scan His bent head and the slowly scribbled page That's hidden at the sound; the draught would fat Fragments of verses to the littered floor As a false snowstorm falls upon a stage.
J. E. M. LUCIE-SMITH
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