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Robert Laurence Binyon - Flame And Snow
Work rating: Low

The bare branches rose against the gray sky.
 Under them, freshly fallen, snow shone to the eye.

 Up the hill--slope, over the brow it shone,
 Spreading an immaterial beauty to tread upon.

 In the elbow of black boughs it clung, nested white,
 And smooth below it slept in the solitude of its light.

 It was deep to the knee in the hollow; there in a stump of wood
 I struck my bill--hook, warm to the fingers` blood, and stood,

 Pausing, and breathed and listened: all the air around
 Was filled with busy strokes and ringing of clean sound,

 And now and again a crack and a slow rending, to tell
 When a tree heavily tottered and swift with a crash fell.

 I smelt the woody smell of smoke from the fire, now
 Beginning to spurt from frayed bracken and torn bough

 In the lee of a drift, fed from our long morning toil
 And sending smart to the eyes the smoke in a blue coil.

 I lopped the twigs from a fresh--cut pole and tossed it aside
 To the stakes heaped beyond me, and made a plunging stride,

 And gathered twines of bramble and dead hazel sticks
 And a faggot of twisted thorn with snow lumped in the pricks,

 And piled the smoulder high. Soon a blaze tore
 Up through hissing boughs and shrivelling leaves, from a core

 Of quivering crimson; soon the heat burst and revelled,
 And apparitions of little airy flames dishevelled

 Gleamed and vanished, a lost flight as of elfin wings,
 Trembling aloft to the wild music that Fire sings

 Dancing alive from nothing, lovely and mad. And still
 The snow, pale as a dream, slept on the old hill,

 Softly fallen and strange. Which made me more to glow,
 Beauty of young flames, or wonder of young snow?
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