Always the same when on a fated night
At last the gathered snow lets down as white
As may be in dark woods and with a song
It shall not make again all winter long—
Of hissing on the yet uncovered ground,—
I almost stumble looking up and round,
As one who, overtaken by the end,
Gives up his errand and lets death descend
Upon him where he is, with nothing done
To evil, no important triumph won
More than if life had never been begun.
Yet all the precedent is on my side:
I know that winter death has never tried
The earth but it has failed; the snow may heap
In long storms an undrifted four feet deep
As measured against maple, birch and oak;
It cannot check the Peeper’s silver croak;
And I shall see the snow all go down hill
In water of a slender April rill
That flashes tail through last year’s withered brake
And dead weeds like a disappearing snake.
Nothing will be left white but here a birch
And there a clump of houses with a church.
_William Ellery Leonard_
William Ellery Leonard was born at Plainfield, New Jersey, January
25, 1876. He received his A.M. at Harvard in 1899 and completed his
studies at the Universities of Göttingen and Bonn. After traveling
for several years throughout Europe, he became a teacher and has
been professor of English in the University of Wisconsin since 1906.
_The Vaunt of Man_ (1912) is Leonard’s most representative volume.
Traditional in form and material, it is anything but conservative in
spirit. Leonard’s insurrectionary fervor speaks sonorously in the
simplest of his quatrains and the strictest of his sonnets. This
protesting passion is given an even wider sweep in _The Lynching
Bee_ (1920), the title-poem being a terrific indictment in which the
poet’s outrage speaks with a new ironism.
Besides his original poetry, Leonard has published several volumes
of translations from the Greek and Latin as well as a series of
paraphrases of the fables of Æsop.