Earth’s immeasurable surprise
Ewe with two lambs in the snow by Andrew Hill, CC BY-SA via Wikimedia Commons
“Lambs that learn to walk in snow
When their bleating clouds the air
Meet a vast unwelcome, know
Nothing but a sunless glare.
Newly stumbling to and fro
All they find, outside the fold,
Is a wretched width of cold.
As they wait beside the ewe,
Her fleeces wetly caked, there lies
Hidden round them, waiting too,
Earth’s immeasurable surprise.
They could not grasp it if they knew,
What so soon will wake and grow
Utterly unlike the snow.” — Philip Larkin
What more can one add to such verse? Nothing, really, except to wish you the immeasurable surprise of mercies that are “new every morning.”
This post was first published seven years ago. At the time I chose Larkin’s poem to quote here, I knew nothing about him and little dreamed I would be studying his work someday in one of my Oxford classes during the Covid shutdown. As it happens, one of my own poems, a personal favorite, was modeled in form and meter on one of Larkin’s classics. Thus, another example of “immeasurable surprises” that grace our lives unpredictably with what we cannot know in advance.
The original post, comments and photo are linked, along with two other related posts, below. These links to related posts, and their thumbnail photos, do not appear in the blog feed; they are only visible when viewing the individual posts by clicking on each one. I have no idea why, nor do I know how they choose the related posts. That’s just the way WordPress does things.
- Posted in: Uncategorized
- Tagged: baby animals, ewe, growth, hope, joy, lambs, nature, Philip Larkin, poetry, renewal, seasons, snow, springtime, unexpected blessings, winter
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