Our
poem from the archives this morning is "The Snow Queen" -- a wry,
contemporary take on Kai's enthrallment to the Snow Queen from Gerda's
point of view. (the author also explores this idea in "The Last Poem
About the Snow Queen," from the collection Blood Pressure.)
The Snow Queen
You tell yourself he only left you for her
because of the wicked shard of glass in his eye,
but the truth is, every man wants an ice princess.
The truth is, you're too easy to get used to —
your sloppy warmth, the heat from your skin
fresh from the garden — it's too much for him.
He'd rather marvel at her tedious snowflakes,
caress her frosted hair, bask in that cold gaze,
that veneer of symmetry. So you wander
around town like an idiot, forgetting
even your shoes. The boys there
are all still in awe of her. "Did you see
that thing she was driving?" they keep asking.
You set off to bring him back, not thinking
you are the last person he wants to see.
"He's trapped in that ice castle," you murmur,
"He needs to be rescued." Dogged, you follow
the tiny shards of glass, and their sparkle.
And when you finally find him, dark with cold
from her brutal kisses, he doesn't even
recognize you. You stop blaming the shard
in his eye; how can you rescue a man
whose heart, transfixed by skeletal crystal,
craves the bruising of frost?
How To Have Your Heart Broken
To love and lose a dear friend,
To follow his trail through perils
Adventures, to trek in ice and snow
To meet crows and outlaw girls and
Learn a queen of ice has him like
A toy. To find him and with quaking
Heart, try to release him.
My tears freeze and my choice
To hate is brushed away
As I see the sliver in the eye,
The cold woman and her lack
Of love. Oh to be a magician,
A girl with a wand, how my
Heart hopes it's warmth
Can make it all go away.
The robber girl has always made me sad, so I just wrote this, and will post it before I think better of it.
*
I gave her my reindeer
Who was all of my heart
The muff I kept and would imagine
Her hand holding mine
Within
My heart’s a tricky thing
Scarred
Not all my own doing
But I had to make my mark
Otherwise, who remembers me
Dark child of want
Who gave away her heart
To bear a white bird to her wyrd
She doesn’t like girls. She’s an ice queen, right?
It’s the boys she preys on. They can’t resist
the cold coquetry of her diamond gaze.
She leads, and they follow.
She tickles them under the chin, promising them power:
The world. Sweetmeats. A new pair of skates.
She doesn’t like girls. But watch her stalk
up the street, dragging her fur cloak through the slush:
showers of snow billowing past the gaslight,
to stoop, mother-tender
and smooth the little match-girl’s tangled hair
and tuck her up under a white blanket.
AFTER THE ICE QUEEN
Kai's eye was sore; yet what he saw was real.
He had no special gift for mundane life.
The Ice Queen's kisses cut him like a knife.
He climbed aboard her sledge. She does not steal
but knows her own. And leaves them on their own
to solve her icy puzzles. Find a way
to write eternity. Perhaps they pay
for wisdom with their death. All that is known
has costs. And Gerda's journey had its price,
ignored what flowers could tell her, cast aside
the robber girl and princess. Who both tried
but love no more than puzzles gives advice.
Gerda and Kai were happy. There deaths came
from boredom, every mundane day the same.
The Last Poem About the Snow Queen
Then it was that little Gerda walked into the Palace, through the
great gates, in a biting wind…. She saw Kay, and knew him at once;
she flung her arms round his neck, held him fast, and cried, “Kai,
little Kai, have I found you at last?”
But he sat still, rigid and cold.
—Hans Christian Andersen, “The Snow Queen”
You wanted to know “love” in all its habitats, wanted
to catalog the joints, the parts, the motions, wanted
to be a scientist of romance: you said
you had to study everything, go everywhere,
even here, even
this ice palace in the far north.
You said you were ready, you’d be careful.
Smart girl, you wore two cardigans, a turtleneck,
furlined boots, scarves,
a stocking cap with jinglebells.
And over the ice you came, gay as Santa,
singing and bringing gifts.
Ah, but the journey was long, so much longer
than you’d expected, and the air so thin,
the sky so high and black.
What are these cold needles, what are these shafts of ice,
you wondered on the fourteenth day.
What are those tracks that glitter overhead?
The one you came to see was silent,
he wouldn’t say “stars” or “snow,”
wouldn’t point south, wouldn’t teach survival.
And you’d lost your boots, your furs,
now you were barefoot on the ice floes, fingers blue,
tears freezing and fusing your eyelids.
Now you know: this is the place
where water insists on being ice,
where wind insists on breathlessness,
where the will of the cold is so strong
that even the stone’s desire for heat
is driven into the eye of night.
What will you do now, little Gerda?
Kai and the Snow Queen are one, they’re a single
pillar of ice, a throne of silence—
and they love you
the way the teeth of winter
love the last red shred of November.
[My quintessential winter poem. A sort of love poem, too, but so
deliciously brutal. And man, I adore second person. And fairy tale
poems are an entire genre unto themselves!]
Susan Prospere, "On Thin Ice"
Then we lifted the cans of snow
to flock the tree in our sixth grade classroom
& we sprayed the stencils
pressed against the windows
to make snowflakes, each one different,
believing, because we were told,
that under a microscope
each powdery flake of real snow
has its own composition. That's the first
I'd heard of formal variance, & I
could see that no matter
how far into the deep woods
I would go, each little particulate grief
would have a structure. It's for memory's
sake, the teacher told us,
the words are arranged by rules
of poetic composition, & in my sleep,
the rhymes kept repeating,
like our fingers drumming against the desktops
as we scanned verse, lost in rêveries
that had little to do with meaning,
but rose instead from sound,
playing in the preholiday afternoons
like music. Swedenborg said the angels
express thought with consonants
that clack across the tongue
in regimental order, while feeling flows
through the vowels, small in number,
but always essential in making
a whole. My brother wrote words
backwards, as if he'd already been where
the rest of us would go. Tell me
what it's like there, I think
I wanted to say, cupping my mittened hands
around each syllable, but my brother
lay on the white sheet
of the hospital bed, unmoving,
like a branch in an icy field we walked
away from. Across the frozen tundra,
Gerda traveled to bring Kay home,
& when she found him at the Snow Queen's
palace, her breath froze in the air
into clouds of angels. I do not know
how long Kai struggled
under the Northern Lights to solve
the Ice Puzzle of Reason, pushing
the letters over the earth
to form eternity, but I know
that as long as his heart was pierced
with a fragment of evil, the work
he did was useless. Once my brother
put down the ragged pieces
of a life he couldn't fit
together. It's by sheer will
he's come back, following
the tracks across each wintry page
he holds before him, & when
he stumbles, the austere & beautiful
face of the Snow Queen
turns & mocks him at the window.`
Adrienne Rich, "The Snow Queen"
Child with a chip of mirror in his eye
Saw the world ugly, fled to plains of ice
Where beauty was the Snow Queen's promises.
Under my lids a splinter sharp as his
Has made me wish you lying dead
Whose image digs the needle deeper still.
In the deceptive province of my birth
I had seen yes turn no, the saints descend,
Their sacred faces twisted into smiles,
The stars gone lechering, the village spring
Gush mud and toads---all miracles
Befitting an incalculable age.
To love a human face was to discover
The cracks of paint and varnish on the brow;
Soon to distrust all impulses of flesh
That strews its sawdust on the chamber floor,
While at the window peer two crones
Who once were Juliet and Jessica.
No matter, since I kept a little while
One thing intact from that perversity---
Though landscapes bloomed in monstrous cubes and coils.
In you belonged simplicities of light
To mend distraction, teach the air
To shine, the stars to find their way again.
Yet here the Snow Queen's cold prodigious will
Commands me, and your face has lost its power,
Dissolving to its opposite like the rest.
Under my ribs a diamond splinter now
Sticks, and has taken root; I know
Only this frozen spear that drives me through.
Andersen's Snow Queen is
a long tale, told in seven parts, and your poems can address any or all
of them -- giving you many themes to explore and many characters to
choose from: male and female, human and non-human, good-hearted and
wicked (and those who are in between)...you can take your pick.
Rebecca Solnit, for example, focuses on the natural elements in Andersen's tale in this passage from The Faraway Goodbye:
"You could read The Snow Queen as
a story about primordial forces versus animal empathies or even cold
versus warmth. The boy with ice in his heart, Kai, disappears into the
north on his sled, and his friend, Gerda, from the adjoining attic,
misses him, mourns, waits for spring, hopes, kisses her grandmother
goodbye, and walks to the river to begin looking for the boy." After
months of delay by an old woman with a magical garden, "she escapes into
a landscape where autumn is spreading, and falls in with a talking
crow, and then a prince and a princess, and then a robber girl who
unties a captive reindeer for Gerda to ride. The talking reindeer, who
is himself a marker of how far north she is, carries her deeper into
the north, into the country of winter, into her quest. On his back she
reaches the home of a second old woman, a Laplander who sends her on
with an introduction written on a dried cod to a third, a Finnish woman
farther north. This third fate or fairy or crone lives almost naked in a
sauna-like house and puts ice on the reindeer's head to keep it
comfortable.
"Even
the reindeer implores the grimy Finnish enchantress for aid for Gerda;
it's a fairy tale in which everything helps the humble and openhearted,
in which every creature, except the trolls and the Snow Queen, serves
the principal of warmth in its own way. But the Finnish woman replies,
in this story of women and animals and hardly a man, 'I can't give her
any greater power than she already has. Don't you see how great it is?
Don't you see how people and animals want to serve her, how she has come
so far in the world on her own two feet?"
Deborah Eisenberg speaks (in Mirror, Mirror on the Wall) of how unsettling she found the fairy tale as a child:
"The
febrile clarity and propulsion is accomplished at the expense of the
reader's nerves. Especially taxing are the claims on the reader by both
Kai and Gerda. Who has not, like Gerda, been exiled from the familiar
comforts of one's world by the departure or defection of a beloved? And
what child has not been confounded by the daily employment of impossible
obstacles and challenges? Who has not been forced to accede to a
longing that nothing but its object can allay? On the other hand, who
has not experienced some measure or some element of Kai's despair? Who
has not, at one time or another, been paralyzed and estranged as their
appetite and affection for life leaches away? . . . Who has not, at
least briefly, retreated into a shining hermetic fortress from which the
rest of the world appears frozen and colourless? Who has not courted an
annihilating involvement? Who has not mistaken intensity for
significance? What devotee of art has not been denied art's blessing?
And who, withholding sympathy from their unworthy self, has not been
ennobled by the sympathy of a loving friend?"
Indeed.
Mortal Knowledge
The way rain trickled
through vine leaves
and entered his mouth
seemed as if he were sipping
the snow queen’s blood. Sorrow
from the slit vein
of a cloud.
Three days earlier, she stood
draped in her ermine drifts
hair glinting on the pines
as her hand dared to touch his chest.
The heat would only hasten
her death
but she wanted to feel
a heart, a rhythmic shovel
struggling to clear
(though impossibly)
the obstacles to love.
Perhaps
Perhaps she loved him first,
followed him out of habit,
felt the zero seep from his pores,
his breath a tundra, his disdain
the ice of a parvenue.
Perhaps she left that cold love
for a better, returned
to the robber girl
who'd shown her reindeer
and bannocks baked on coals,
who gave her hot cider
pierced by a poker,
who kissed her slowly
while the heat rose
between their breasts.
Perhaps this is the story
I wanted to read, the one
Andersen was afraid to tell,
while the young man he loved
without telling or hope,
grew old, one letter,
one small letter away
from cold.
A Beautiful, Warm Summer
Sometimes, in the summer
When the dust hangs golden and redolent
Of the snow-motes, scattering
Before the fiery lances, in the waste,
And the air is heavy and hot
With the scent of roses, cloying
As unstirred love;
Or when the voice, rereading verses
Loved too well by repetition
Blurs in my ears, until instead
The wild croaking of a long dead bird I hear;
And I lose the horizon, in a sink
Of warm water, or the in the scented
Soil of the window box;
And I lie awake and stifling;
When the shadows running black along the wall
Are dreams I cannot catch;
I wonder in what wilderness she makes her way.
I seem to see her, riding hard
Along the edge of daylight,
Bent low across the thrumming hide
And stretching neck, her fierce teeth flashing
Sometimes in a smile, or a snarl.
Her hair is spangled like the midnight open sky
Bejewelled with pollen or with snow.
(The image changes, not that it matters now.
The story ended: as I tell the children
I returned to heaven.)
*I* returned with Kai, and *she*
Laughing, tossed her head and rode
On into the wide world.
she loved him.
that's the obvious thing
and the most desperately-hidden secret.
everyone knows it was always about love;
a boy who'd lost it
and the girl who found him because of it.
but she warmed him as best she could
by taking away the feeling of coldness,
by wrapping him up in snow so he
wouldn't be burnt on raw ice.
she only got two kisses.
she knew she could have no more;
one to ease his chill, and one to
keep him close to her.
love drives us to strange things,
and she was no exception.
(he did hitch his sledge to hers,
after all, so it was his choice,
she tells herself.)
she showed him as much of the world
as she could reach, flying on a black cloud
that sang to them ceaselessly
and delighted them both, though she worried
in silence, inside her pale self,
that he did not seem as delighted as she.
even the snowflaked face of the open moon
beaming silver tinsel down to them
did not make him smile as she hoped.
she showed him the wolves with their
solemnizing poems carried on the
mist of their hot breath into the sky;
she showed him the black crows with their
tireless wings and their glittering,
intelligent eyes that saw so much.
he slept at her feet and felt little,
and quietly she still ached
to see a childlike expression of wonder
on that lovely young face.
so she took him to her palace.
she had made it enormous, because
in the north, there is no need to be small,
and it was open to the world,
an invitation of wonder, of impossible beauty,
of icy, crystaline perfection.
the northern lights were the only ceiling she needed,
and she could gaze at them, speechless,
for days without moving.
but the only thing that stirred him to interest
were the puzzle pieces set about around her throne,
and she sat comfortably upon her holy seat
and watched him work. his mind was a contraption
that impressed her, and his way of
forming words out of chaos
made her smile.
she did not notice how blued he had become;
he never complained of cold.
in the back of her mind, she knew
she would have set fire to a black stone
to give him warmth, if he asked for it,
even if it would have melted her perfect skin.
she wanted to encourage him,
to earn more smiles from him,
even if he was always distracted by his puzzles;
so she promised him a reward, the only one
she could give, if he figured out the
almost-impossible word
in his self-created game.
satisfied that he would be well-occupied,
she told him she must leave
and shower snow upon the black mountains
so that lemons and grapes would grow.
he barely glanced up as she swept away
in her sledge. she did look back,
but he did not notice.
she returned days--weeks--later,
eager to see his round, pensive face,
only to find an empty hall
and the word ETERNITY
clearly spelled out
in lonely ice.
Instructions
by Neil Gaiman
Touch the wooden gate in the wall you never
saw before.
Say "please" before you open the latch,
go through,
walk down the path.
A red metal imp hangs from the green-painted
front door,
as a knocker,
do not touch it; it will bite your fingers.
Walk through the house. Take nothing. Eat
nothing.
However, if any creature tells you that it hungers,
feed it.
If it tells you that it is dirty,
clean it.
If it cries to you that it hurts,
if you can,
ease its pain.
From the back garden you will be able to see the wild wood.
The deep well you walk past leads to Winter's realm;
there is another land at the bottom of it.
If you turn around here,
you can walk back, safely;
you will lose no face. I will think no less of you.
Once through the garden you will be in the wood.
The trees are old. Eyes peer from the undergrowth.
Beneath a twisted oak sits an old woman. She
may ask for something;
give it to her. She
will point the way to the castle.
Inside it are three princesses.
Do not trust the youngest. Walk on.
In the clearing beyond the castle the twelve
months sit about a fire,
warming their feet, exchanging tales.
They may do favors for you, if you are polite.
You may pick strawberries in December's frost.
Trust the wolves, but do not tell them where
you are going.
The river can be crossed by the ferry. The ferry-
man will take you.
(The answer to his question is this:
If he hands the oar to his passenger, he will be free to
leave the boat.
Only tell him this from a safe distance.)
If an eagle gives you a feather, keep it safe.
Remember: that giants sleep too soundly; that
witches are often betrayed by their appetites;
dragons have one soft spot, somewhere, always;
hearts can be well-hidden,
and you betray them with your tongue.
Do not be jealous of your sister.
Know that diamonds and roses
are as uncomfortable when they tumble from
one's lips as toads and frogs:
colder, too, and sharper, and they cut.
Remember your name.
Do not lose hope — what you seek will be found.
Trust ghosts. Trust those that you have helped
to help you in their turn.
Trust dreams.
Trust your heart, and trust your story.
When you come back, return the way you came.
Favors will be returned, debts will be repaid.
Do not forget your manners.
Do not look back.
Ride the wise eagle (you shall not fall).
Ride the silver fish (you will not drown).
Ride the grey wolf (hold tightly to his fur).
There is a worm at the heart of the tower; that is
why it will not stand.
When you reach the little house, the place your
journey started,
you will recognize it, although it will seem
much smaller than you remember.
Walk up the path, and through the garden gate
you never saw before but once.
And then go home. Or make a home.
And rest.
