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Archibald Lampman (1861-1899)

Winter-Solitude


              1I saw the city's towers on a luminous pale-gray sky;
              2Beyond them a hill of the softest mistiest green,
              3With naught but frost and the coming of night between,
              4And a long thin cloud above the colour of August rye.

              5I sat in the midst of a plain on my snowshoes with bended knee
              6Where the thin wind stung my cheeks,
              7And the hard snow ran in little ripples and peaks,
              8Like the fretted floor of a white and petrified sea.

              9And a strange peace gathered about my soul and shone,
            10As I sat reflecting there,
            11In a world so mystically fair,
            12So deathly silent--I so utterly alone.

Online text copyright © 2009, Ian Lancashire (the Department of English) and the University of Toronto.
Published by the Web Development Group, Information Technology Services, University of Toronto Libraries.

Original text: At the Long Sault and Other New Poems, ed. Duncan Campbell Scott and Edward Killoran Brown (Toronto: Ryerson, 1943): 21, as reprinted in The Poems of Archibald Lampman (including At the Long Sault), intro. by Margaret Coulby Whitridge (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974).
First publication date: 1943
RPO poem editor: Ian Lancashire
RP edition: RPO 1997.
Recent editing: 4:2002/2/21

Rhyme: abba

Other poems by Archibald Lampman

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