Nox Nivosa

Snowflakes downfloating from the void
Upon my face,
Spilth of the silent alchemy employed
In deeps of space
Where viewless everlasting fingers ply
The power whose secret is the mystery
That doth my world encase ;


Power that with equal ease outshakes
Yon architrave
Of massy stars in heaven and these frail flakes
Earth’s floor that pave ;
Swings the flamed orbs with infinite time for dower
And strews these velvet jewels not an hour
Of sunshine that will brave ;


Yet of whose clustered crystals none
But speaks the act
Of the hand that steers each ceaseless-wheeling sun
And to whose tact
Fire-wreath and spangled ice alike respond ;
Thoughts from the void frozen to flower and frond,
Divinely all compact ;
Snowflakes, of pureness unalloyed,
That in dark space
Are built, and spilt from out the teeming void
With prodigal grace,
Air-quarried temples though you fall scarce-felt
And all your delicate architecture melt
To tears upon my face, --
I too am such encrystalled breath
In the void planned
And bodied forth to surge of life and death ;
And as I stand
Beneath this sacramental spilth of snow,
Crumbling, you whisper : ‘Fear thou not to go
Back to the viewless hand ;
"Thence to be moulded forth again
Through time and space
Till thy imperishable self attain
Such strength and grace
Through endless infinite refinement passed
By the eternal Alchemist that at last
Thou see Him face to face."

Walter Leslie Wilmshurst, The Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse (1917)