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Keats in Winter

The snow ceased at noon and froze at midnight.
The next day dawned in stillness, sheathed in ice.
the landscape, all reduced to lucid contours,
seemed something new, a homely kind of wonder.

He stood on the porch, unwilling yet to breach
the shining skin, unready to disperse
a certain foolish thought that rose before him:
that his or any other weight would prove

too slight to pierce the cold eternal glazing,
that he or the world had changed beyond repairing:
that as he struck the ice, his deft and prayerful
touch would set the hills all deeply chiming.

 

by Joseph Prever

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