The Snowman on the Moor

Stalemated their armies stood, with tottering banners:

She flung from a room

Still ringing with bruit of insults and dishonors

And in fury left him

Glowering at the coal-fire: ‘Come find me’—her last taunt.

He did not come

But sat on, guarding his grim battlement.

By the doorstep

Her winter-beheaded daisies, marrowless, gaunt,

Warned her to keep

Indoors with politic goodwill, not haste

Into a landscape

Of stark wind-harrowed hills and weltering mist;

But from the house

She stalked intractable as a driven ghost

Across moor snows

Pocked by rock-claw and rabbit-track: she must yet win

Him to his knees—

Let him send police and hounds to bring her in.

Nursing her rage

Through bare whistling heather, over stiles of black stone,

To the world's white edge

She came, and called hell to subdue an unruly man

And join her siege.

It was no fire-blurting fork-tailed demon

Volcanoed hot

From marble snow-heap of moor to ride that woman

With spur and knout

Down from pride's size: instead, a grisly-thewed,

Austere, corpse-white

Giant heaved into the distance, stone-hatcheted,

Sky-high, and snow

Floured his whirling beard, and at his tread

Ambushed birds by

Dozens dropped dead in the hedges: o she felt

No love in his eye,

Worse—saw dangling from that spike-studded belt

Ladies' sheaved skulls:

Mournfully the dry tongues clacked their guilt:

‘Our wit made fools

Of kings, unmanned kings' sons: our masteries

Amused court halls:

For that brag, we barnacle these iron thighs.’

Throned in the thick

Of a blizzard, the giant roared up with his chittering trophies.

From brunt of axe-crack

She shied sideways: a white fizz! and the giant, pursuing,

Crumbled to smoke.

Humbled then, and crying,

The girl bent homeward, brimful of gentle talk

And mild obeying.