Snow as Deformity, Decoration, and Disguise

In the grotesque mode (passages from d'Aubigné, Cyrano and others) snow bedecks its victims with flour, sugar, cream, wig, foam, falling feathers, or spit from heaven, giving them a caricatural, comic, or monstrous aspect. Many of these images also appear in poetry whose basic allegiance is to the précieux tradition (Gautier's Fantuisies d'hiver ), but the mockery is gentler: snow prettifies, decorates, domesticates. In satiric passages (the “mockery king of snow” in Richard II , W. R. Rogers' “White Christmas” and others) snow is an insubstantial pretense or a thin disguise. Whether as melting snowman, symbol of cold chastity, or white sheet that covers up an ugly reality, it is false, impermanent, and derisory. But each of these interrelated modes ‐ the grotesque, the preécieux , the satiric ‐ remains dependent on one or the other of the two fundamentalvisions of snow that it exaggerates, mocks, distorts, or embroiders upon: snow as a radiant affirmation of beauty, vitality, and renewal, (exemplified by the use of snow‐as‐feathers imagery in Ruth Stone's “Snow”) or snow as negation, deprivation, loss, and extinction, (exemplified by Apollinaire's use of the same imagery in “La Blanche Neige.”)