Snow Dance For The Dead

Lola Ridge 1873 – 1941



Dance, little children ... it is holy twilight . . .
Have you hung paper flowers about the necks of the ikons?
Dance soft . . . but very gaily ... on tip-toes like the snow.

Spread your little pinafores
And courtesy as the snow does . . .
The snow that bends this way and that
In silent salutation.
Do not wait to warm your hands about the fires.
Do not mind the rough licking of the wind.
Dance forth into the shaggy night that shakes itself upon you.

Dance beneath the Kremlin towers—golden
In the royal
Purple of the sky—
But not there where the light is strongest . . .
Bright hair is dazzling in the light.
Dance in the dim violet places
Where the snow throws out a faint lustre
Like the lustre of dead faces . . .
Snow downier than wild-geese feathers . . .
Enough filling for five hundred pillows ...
By the long deep trench of the dead.

Bend, little children,
To the rhythm of the snow
That undulates this way and that
In silver spirals.
Cup your hands like tiny chalices . . .
Let the flakes fill up the rosy
Hollows of your palms
And alight upon your hair,
Like kisses that cling softly
A moment and let go ...
Like many kisses falling altogether . . .
Quick . . . cool kisses.

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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on March 05, 2023

1:01 min read
144

Quick analysis:

Scheme ABC BBDCBXX EXXXABFBBBX ECDBBBBXXCFB
Closest metre Iambic tetrameter
Characters 1,174
Words 205
Stanzas 4
Stanza Lengths 3, 7, 11, 12

Lola Ridge

Lola Ridge was an anarchist poet and an influential editor of avant-garde feminist and Marxist publications best remembered for her long poems and poetic sequences She along with other political poets of the early Modernist period has been coming under increasing critical scrutiny at the beginning of the twenty-first century more…

All Lola Ridge poems | Lola Ridge Books

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