Winter Night

Amos Wilder

O magical the winter night! Illusory this stretch
Of unimaginable grays; so shadowy a sketch
Only the fading inks of spirit artistry can etch.

Here is nor dawn nor eventide nor any light we know,
This ghostly incandescence and unearthly afterglow,
This far-spread conflagration of the fields of snow

That pales the clouds, snow-laden, and blanches all the night,
As though in place of moon and stars some spectral satellite
Cast glamor on the earth and floods of violet light.

The wraith-like landscape glimmers, valley, lake and hill,
Unutterably patient! Intolerably still!
No inclination of a leaf nor songster’s trill.

. . . So could one stand an hour, a day, a century,
Breathless . . . What frozen silence! What immobility!
As of some gray unfinished world in age-long reverie.

O whither have you vanished, treading the leaves of fall,
Bright spirit of the summer, leaving the scene in thrall
To silence? To what springtime, far, far beyond recall?

What far retreat of being, what ebbing of the flood
Of life to bless far landscapes anew with leaf and bud
Has left prospect passionless and charmed this stricken wood?

. . .  And yet from depths how distant, that tide of green shall rise,
And that bright spirit come again with April in her eyes,
And winter’s pale prostrations be but phantom memories.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on January 11, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.

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about this poem

“Winter Night” appears in Amos Niven Wilder’s second poetry collection Arachne (Yale University Press, 1928).

Amos Wilder, born in 1895 in Madison, Wisconsin, was a poet and theologian. In 1923, he published his first poetry collection, Battle Retrospect (Yale University Press), as part of the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Wilder went on to publish several more poetry collections and scholarly works of prose. He died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1993.

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