laugardagur, desember 09, 2006

hvítt

Snow. The new white in the air is always a surprise, every winter. Whiteness flying in the air.

Lines from a ballad come to me:
Jag ser, jag ser
på dina hvita fingrar små
att vigselsringen ej har suttit på dem förrän i går

Jag ser, jag ser
på dina snöhvita bröst
att de ej have været någon småbarnatröst

The hv appears without my willing it, and it tumbles out of my mouth as kv. I feel the harder, sharper sound is whiter. (I cannot justify the rest of the mangling, the translation into some concocted dialect.)

White as a keen edge. White as blankness: the untrodden, unsullied; unmarked and so unread, unwed. But Baronessen wrote about this much better than I could hope to:

But in the midst of the long row there hangs a canvas which differs from the others. The frame of it is as fine and as heavy as any, and as proudly as any carries the golden plate with the royal crown. But on this one plate no name is inscribed, and the linen within the frame is snow-white from corner to comer, a blank page.

2 ummæli:

tristan sagði...

one might easily compile an anthology of poems about snow ... and thanx, as usual, for the stimulation

sterna sagði...

I can recommend The Idea of North, published fairly recently. In fact, I think I will.

 
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