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A Kind of Hiddenness
Shanti Daffern
Read: Cloudless Snowfall, by Franz Wright
I first read this poem when it landed in my inbox on 3rd August 2019 (I just checked) after I stumbled into (don’t ask) a poem-a-day mailout of a parish church in Nova Scotia, Canada. The poems accompanied the Dormition Fast kept in the Eastern Orthodox Church at that season. Which is to say, it’s a good poem for a fast.
‘Nightfall’ ‘descending’ snowfall and geese migrating: it’s a good poem for Advent. I love the evocation of the winter landscape; the skeins of white and dark that run through the poem; and Wright’s precise way of playing with sensations across senses. You picture the freshness of snowfall, say, before he turns it to the disconcerting whiteness of ash, before he says - no, it was nightfall, picture the kind of white you intuit at night. And that shift in perception - just eight words - prepares for the whisking away of the snow ‘descending’, ‘vanishing’.
When I read the poem, it’s the description of the reception of the host that catches me. There is such purity, such beauty and gentleness. And I declare there are not enough poems written about the reception of the host. The poem keeps that sparse precision in shifting between images, yet relies on some implicit interchange of association – a snowflake melting on a tongue, too, the touch of the host ‘in this hand’ too.
There’s an imaginative immersion which is not unlike Ignatian meditation. What God would come down like a flake of snow, would choose to become incarnate, a babe in His world?
It’s a sacramental sort of poem. ‘I look up’, Wright says, and we follow the direction of his gaze into the scene and out of sight. ‘by the way thank You for | keeping Your face hidden’. It seems an unpromising ending for an Advent poem. We are preparing ourselves for the inverse movement now, for the showing of our Saviour who comes to us. And yet in the longing and waiting of Advent, and the orientation this season gives us towards the last things, there is a kind of hiddenness too.
Where is God at work in this poem and where is He hidden? How do we respond to what is hidden, or what we can touch? How do we cultivate practices to say ‘by the way thank You’? How do we bear the beauty of this world?