There is More than Glass between the Snow and the Huge Roses. Louis MacNeice

When she was at primary school, Carmel learned about the four seasons, spring, summer, autumn and winter. Her teacher, Mrs Bennett was a creative sprite and she used to get the children to draw pictures of each season and Carmel enjoyed these lessons. She came from a local farm, in South Derry and from an early age she was aware in the spring, the fields were ploughed, the seeds were planted, and in the autumn the crops were harvested. 

When she went to Queen’s University, in 1975, she stayed in Aquinas Hall which was student accommodation on the Malone Road in South Belfast. It was run by Dominican nuns. When she arrived she had no idea of its architectural splendour. She later found out that it was designed by Samuel Stevenson, a Belfast architect and was commissioned by a tea merchant, James Johnston and that ‘the cream-stuccoed house’ was in an Italianate style. She loved architecture although she did not understand it. She only knew that when she arrived and looked at the beautiful porch with the Corinthian polished granite columns and the amazing bay windows she realised she was not in South Derry anymore. She had no idea that the poet Louis MacNeice lived in this splendid house and it is said that his poem, ‘Snow’ celebrated these beautiful bay windows: 

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was

Spawning snow and pink roses against it

Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:

World is suddener than we fancy it

In her first year at the university, she studied Louis MacNeice’s poetry and when the lecturer mentioned that the poet’s father, who was a Church of Ireland Minister had once lived in Aquinas Hall and that MacNeice had actually written the poem in one of the ground floor rooms. 

When Carmel sat in the very same room with the big bay windows where the poem was composed, on a warm late summer evening, she tried to imagine the ‘great bay-window’ which was ‘spawning snow and pink roses against it’. She thought how poetry could bring you into another world and even on a summer evening, you could imagine snow and pink roses lying against the window pane. She thought about snow and how it could suddenly transform everything. In the last line of his poem ‘Snow’, the poet reflects that ‘there is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses’. The poet suggests that everything is not as it seems. There is more than glass, could mean that there is another world that we cannot see. In C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Lucy steps into an enchanted world where the Queen of Narnia keeps the land in a perpetual state of winter:

And she has made a magic so that it is always winter in Narnia-always winter, but it never gets to Christmas. And she drives about on a sledge, drawn by reindeer, with her wand in her hand and a crown on her head.

We could not imagine a world where there is perpetual winter as the seasons give us a framework to celebrate our main festivals such as Easter and Christmas. Lucy cannot imagine a world, that ‘never gets to Christmas’. 

But we would not want a world without snow. The poet, Wallace Stephens reflected on snow in his poem ‘The Snow Man’:

One must have a mind of winter

To regard the frost and the boughs

Of the pine-trees crusted with snow; 

To have the mind of winter probably means that we should not complain about the snow but learn to be at peace with nature. He advises the reader ‘not to think/Of any misery in the sound of the wind/In the sound of a few leaves’

Snow has been defined by the Met office as ‘solid precipitation which occurs in a variety of minute ice crystals at temperature well below 0 °C but as larger snowflakes at temperature near 0 °C’. John Keats said that Isaac Newton had ‘destroyed the poetry of the rainbow, reducing it to prismatic colours’. In his famous poem, Lamia, he wrote, ‘Do not all charms fly/At the mere touch of cold philosophy?’ 

Carmel remembered a freak snow storm in April but never during the summer months. However, on June 2nd 1975, there were snow showers in the United Kingdom and some cricket matches were called off. Snow can transform a landscape within a short space of time. Once when Carmel was driving from Belfast to Coleraine It suddenly started to snow. Soon she could not see the white lines in the middle of the road. She could barely read the words on the road signs because the snow was beginning to obliterate the letters.  This was one of the days you wished you had taken your mechanics advice and bought winter tyres.

Longfellow’s poem Snow-Flakes describes snowflakes descending from ‘the ‘out of the bosom of the air’. 

Out of the bosom of the Air,

        Out of the cloud-folds of her garments shaken,

Over the woodlands brown and bare,

        Over the harvest-fields forsaken,

            Silent, and soft, and slow

            Descends the snow.

In Ireland if it ever suddenly started to snow in summer, people would think this was a rare phenomenon especially in an age of global warming. People might think it was a great inconvenience if they had to change their plans. Poets like Wallace Stephens would have responded by having ‘a mind of winter’ even though it was not winter. In the last verse of his poem, Stephens writes:

For the listener, who listens in the snow,

And, nothing himself, beholds

Nothing that is not there and nothing that is.

This might mean the listener should not attach to any particular viewpoint. We should just accept the wind, the snow, the seasons. The snowman doesn’t have any views on what reality is. We love to see one suddenly appearing in people’s gardens or in parks. Then when it thaws, the snowman will melt…a lesson in impermanence. 

Stephens commented that his poem was ‘an example of the necessity of identifying oneself with reality in order to understand it and enjoy it’. 

After Carmel had read and studied these poems on snow, she was able to appreciate winter more deeply. Rather than seeing snow as something to be dreaded, she began to value its transformative power and see it as an inspiration, rather than a hindrance.