Friday, October 23, 2009

828. Brueghel's Snow (Six poems about the same picture)

Rutger Kopland - Brueghel's Winter Translated from the Dutch by James Brockway 

 Winter by Brueghel, the hill with hunters and dogs, at their feet the valley with the village. Almost home, but their dead-tired attitudes, their steps in the snow––a return, but almost as slow as arrest. At their feet the depths grow and grow, become wider and further, until the landscape vanishes into a landscape that must be there, is there but only as a longing is there. Ahead of them a jet-black bird dives down. Is it mockery of this labored attempt to return to the life down there: the children skating on the pond, the farms with women waiting and cattle? An arrow underway, and it laughs at its target.

  Anne Stevenson - Brueghel's Snow 

 Here in the snow: three hunters with dogs and pikes trekking over a hill, into and out of those famous footprints - famous and still. What did they catch? They have little to show on their bowed backs. Unlike the delicate skaters below, these are grim, they look ill. In the village, it's zero. Bent shapes in black clouts, raw faces aglow in the firelight, burning the wind for warmth, or their hunger's kill. What happens next? In the unpainted picture? The hunters arrive, pull off their caked boots, curse the weather slump down over stoups. . . Who's painting them now? What has survived to unbandage my eyes as I trudge through this snow, with my dog and stick, four hundred winters ago? 

  Joseph Langland - Hunters In The Snow: Brueghel 

 Quail and rabbit hunters with tawny hounds, Shadowless, out of late afternoon Trudge toward the neutral evening of indeterminate form. Done with their blood-annunciated day Public dogs and all the passionless mongrels Through deep snow Trail their deliberate masters Descending from the upper village home in hovering light. Sooty lamps Glow in the stone-carved kitchens. This is the fabulous hour of shape and form When Flemish children are grey-black-olive And green-dark-brown Scattered and skating informal figures On the mill ice pond. Moving in stillness A hunched dame struggles with her bundled sticks, Letting her evening's comfort cudgel her While she, like jug or wheel, like a wagon cart Walked by lazy oxen along the old snowlanes, Creeps and crunches down the dusky street. High in the fire-red dooryard Half unhitched the sign of the Inn Hangs in the wind Tipped to the pitch of the roof. Near it anonymous parents and peasant girl, Living like proverbs carved in the alehouse walls, Gather the country evening into their arms And lean to the glowing flames. Now in the dimming distance fades The other village; across the valley Imperturbable Flemish cliffs and crags Vaguely advance, close in, loom, Lost in nearness. Now The night-black raven perched in branching boughs Opens its early wing and slipping out Above the grey-green valley Weaves a net of slumber over the snow-capped homes. And now the church, and then the walls and roofs Of all the little houses are become Close kin to shadow with small lantern eyes. And now the bird of evening With shadows streaming down from its gliding wings Circles the neighboring hills Of Hertogenbosch, Brabant. Darkness stalks the hunters, Slowly sliding down. Falling in beating rings and soft diagonals. Lodged in the vague vast valley the village sleeps. 

  William Carlos Williams - The Hunters In The Snow 

The over-all picture 
is winter icy mountains 
in the background the return
 
from the hunt it is toward evening 
from the left 
sturdy hinters lead in 

their pack the inn-sign 
hanging from a 
broken hingeis a stag a crucifix 

between his antlers the cold 
inn yard is 
deserted but for a huge bonfire 

that flares wind-driven tended by 
women who cluster 
about it to the right beyond 

the hill is a pattern of skaters 
Brueghel the painter 
concerned with it all has chosen 

a winter-stuck bush for his 
foreground to
complete the picture 

  Anne Stevenson - Brueghel's Snow 

 Here in the snow: three hunters with dogs and pikes trekking over a hill, into and out of those famous footprints - famous and still. What did they catch? They have little to show on their bowed backs. Unlike the delicate skaters below, these are grim, they look ill. In the village, it's zero. Bent shapes in black clouts, raw faces aglow in the firelight, burning the wind for warmth, or their hunger's kill. What happens next? In the unpainted picture? The hunters arrive, pull off their caked boots, curse the weather slump down over stoups. . . Who's painting them now? What has survived to unbandage my eyes as I trudge through this snow, with my dog and stick, four hundred winters ago? 

  Walter de la Mare - Brueghel's Winter 

 Jagg'd mountain peaks and skies ice-green 
Wall in the wild, cold scene below. 
Churches, farms, bare copse, the sea 
In freezing quiet of winter show; 
Where ink-black shapes on fields in flood 
Curling, skating, and sliding go. 
To left, a gabled tavern; a blaze; 
Peasants; a watching child; and lo, 
Muffled, mute--beneath naked trees 
In sharp perspective set a-row-- 
Trudge huntsmen, sinister spears aslant, 
Dogs snuffling behind them in the snow; 
And arrowlike, lean, athwart the air 
Swoops into space a crow. 

But flame, nor ice, nor piercing rock, 
Nor silence, as of a frozen sea, 
Nor that slant inward infinite line 
Of signboard, bird, and hill, and tree, 
Give more than subtle hint of him 
 Who squandered here life's mystery.

 John /berryman - Winter Landscape

The three men coming down the winter hill
In brown, with tall poles and a pack of hounds
At heel, through the arrangement of the trees,
Past the five figures at the burning straw
Returning cold and silent to their town,

Returning in the drifted snow, the rink
Lively with children, to the older men
The long companions they can never reaach,
The blue light, men with ladders, by the church
The sledge and shadow in the twilit street

Are not aware that in the sandy time
To come, the revil waste of history
Outstretched, they will be seen upon the brow
Of that same hill, when all their company
Will have been irrevocably lost,

These men, this particular three in brown
Witnessed by birds will keep the scene and say
By their configuration with the trees,
The small bridge, the red housed and the fire,
What place, what time, what morning occasion

Sent them into the wood, a pack of hounds
At heel and the tall poles upon their shoulders,
Thence to return as now we see them and
Ankle deep in snow down the winter hill
Descend, while three birds watch and the fourth flies.