Since posting ‘Silver’ by Walter de la Mare this morning, I can’t help but think of other much loved verses by him. Pieter Brueghel seems to inspire poets, I wrote a little while ago about ‘Landscape With the Fall of Icarus’ by William Carlos Williams. De la Mare was also inspired, by a chilly winter scene painted by the sixteenth century artist in 1556.
Brueghel’s Winter
Jagg’d mountain peaks and skies ice-green
Wall in the wild, cold scene below.
Churches, farms, bare copse, the sea
In freezing quiet of winter show;
Where ink-black shapes on fields in flood
Curling, skating, and sliding go.
To left, a gabled tavern; a blaze;
Peasants; a watching child; and lo,
Muffled, mute–beneath naked trees
In sharp perspective set a-row–
Trudge huntsmen, sinister spears aslant,
Dogs snuffling behind them in the snow;
And arrowlike, lean, athwart the air
Swoops into space a crow.
But flame, nor ice, nor piercing rock,
Nor silence, as of a frozen sea,
Nor that slant inward infinite line
Of signboard, bird, and hill, and tree,
Give more than subtle hint of him
Who squandered here life’s mystery.
Walter de la Mare
Lois Elsden 
Icarus might have made it on Brueghel’s winter day.
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He’d have fallen into a snow drift!
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But the wax might not have melted…heehee.
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