CMP Review 2025-03-14

March 14, 2025

Snow-Storm

Isabella Whiteford Rogerson (1859/1860, died 1905 St John’s Newfoundland, Canada)

Who can paint it in its beauty

In its softness and delight,

With its gleaming pearly whiteness.

As it breaks upon our sight?

Softly, softly, softly falling,

As its bridal robe it weaves,

Till our old world stands unrivalled,

E’en by springtime’s flowers and leaves;

For it falls where leaves come never—

On unsightliness and gloom.

Soft and radiant, fair and lovely,

Pure as lilies in full bloom.

Covering where the roses come not,

Charming woodsheds into bowers.

With such wondrous grace and beauty

That we quite forget the flowers;

Quite forget the rarest sculpture,

As such forms of grace arise,

Forms that none save the Creator

E’er could fashion or devise:

Fold on fold so softly rounded.

Curving into graceful sweep.

Wreathing huge unsightly houses

Into turret, tower, and keep.

All of purest, daintiest, whitest,—

Marble, fairest of the fair,

Never with our snow-clad mansions

For a moment could compare;

Never trees in summer splendor,

Clad in emerald green, outshone

All the delicate diamonds flashing

From trees snow-clad in the sun;

But words fail to tell its sweetness,

Only those who see it know

All the fairy grace and glamour

Of the softly falling snow.

@antonella.f.greco