Today’s Poem: Snow

The bare black places lie / Too near the sky

Missouri-born William F. Matthews’s Painting of a Winter Landscape, c. 1910 (Wikimedia Commons)

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Snow

by Charles Bertram Johnson

All day the clouds 
   Grow cold and fall, 
And soft the white fleece shrouds 
   Field, hill and wall; 
And now I know 
   Why comes the snow: 
The bare black places lie 
   Too near the sky. 
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A tight little nothing, a well-constructed bagatelle, saying no more than that the snow falls in winter — that’s Today’s Poem.

Or, at least, one could read the 1920 “Snow” by the Missouri poet Charles Bertram Johnson (1880–1958) this way. And yet, to dwell a little within the poem is to feel some unease, and to place the poem in the poet’s situation is to sense something more than simply winter snow.

Johnson is little known, and part of the reason is that he spent his life in the Midwest, at a remove from the urban East Coast milieu that characterized his more famous Harlem Renaissance contemporaries. His biographical details are fairly scanty. We do know that for much of his adult life he was a schoolteacher and a preacher, employment that seems to have occupied a great deal of his creative energy. His slim literary output amounts to one book of poems and two smaller pamphlets.

Yet, inspired in youth by the poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar, he made a modest reputation for himself as a poet. Though he published some dialect poems in the style of Dunbar, as well as some devotional verse, he received recognition (again, modest) for his lyric poems. Introducing Johnson in the 1923 Negro Poets and Their Poems, Robert T. Kerlin describes him as a kind of lesser Sara Teasdale, a critical description somewhat hard to parse.

Charles Bertram Johnson, pre-1923 (Wikimedia Commons)

Still, there may be something apt in the comparison. In Today’s Poem, we see a winter scene, not unlike so many of Teasdale’s scenes, presented in language that is at once simple, direct, and imagistic, but with undercurrents of emotional complexity. Teasdale’s poems often evoke beauty, especially wintry beauty, in language that distantly suggests the turbulence she feels in herself and the world.

Johnson’s “Snow” is a single ababccdd octet of dimeter and trimeter lines, but the regular iambic meter of the first line, “All dày the clòuds” gives way to weightier off-beat syllables with “Grow” in the second line and “fleece” in the third. And when we reach “The bare black places lie” in line 7, we have a dense, hard-to-say line that slows us to almost a standstill. From the beginning, we have more threat than we might expect, with the sky itself turning to snow as it “shrouds” the land — and more than the land. It’s impossible to read “black” (that lies “too near the sky”) in Johnson’s poem without feeling a valence the word has for the poet.

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