Snow

I know a bleak unlovely plain,
A dismal stretch of weed and sand,
Where Desolation’s horrors reign,
Severe and grim on every hand.
The shrill winds whistled through the night;
The great drifts eddied here and there
And buried deep and out of sight
My well-trimmed walks and gardens fair.
And now I look across the snows—
A sea of sparkling diadems,
A garden white, wherein there glows
A myriad of precious gems.
The dreary plain must stretch away
Beyond the borders of my plot,
And yet it shimmers back to-day
As dazzling white as Camelot.
There, where the drifts in billows swell,
And border line with border blends,
I know and yet I cannot tell
Where waste begins and garden ends.
And so I wot, were we to see
Some bleak unlovely lives we know
Through eyes of perfect charity
Our careful border lines would go—
The Thee and Me and Me and Thee
Quite buried as in dazzling snow.