8 Beautiful Snow Scenes from Literature

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Whether you're settling in for a few days of snowed-in coziness at home or a few days of airport purgatory, you can probably use something to read. Here are some beautiful descriptions of snow from literature.

1. From An American Childhood, Annie Dillard





2. From Angle of Repose, Wallace Stegner

"Snow blew down the Royal Gorge in a horizontal blur. With Ollie’s sleeping head in her lap and a down comforter around them both, she tried now and then to get a look at that celebrated scenic wonder, but the gorge was only snow-streaked rock indistinguishable from any other rock, all its height and grandeur and pictorial organization obliterated in the storm. The dark, foaming, ice-shored river was so unlike the infant Arkansas that she used to ford on her horse that she didn’t believe in it. The circles that she blew and rubbed on the window healed over in secret ferns of frost."

3. From Seasons at Eagle Pond, Donald Hall


4. From “The Dead,” James Joyce


5. “Winter,” Takarai Kikaku (Trans. Steven D. Carter)

"'It’s mine,' I think –
and the snow seems lighter
on my straw hat."

6. From Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton


7. From Marcovaldo: Or the Seasons in the City, Italo Calvino (Trans. William Weaver)

"Marcovaldo learned to pile the snow into a compact little wall. If he went on making little walls like that, he could build some streets for himself alone; only he would know where those streets led, and everybody else would be lost there. He could remake the city, pile up mountains high as houses, which no one would be able to tell from real houses. But perhaps by now all the houses had turned to snow, inside and out; a whole city of snow with monuments and spires and trees, a city that could be unmade by shovel and remade in a different way."

8. From The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann (Trans. John E. Woods)

"Yet there was a momentary hint of blue sky, and even this bit of light was enough to release a flash of diamonds across the wide landscape, so oddly disfigured by its snowy adventure. Usually the snow stopped at that hour of the day, as if for a quick survey of what had been achieved thus far; the rare days of sunshine seemed to serve much the same purpose—the flurries died down and the sun’s direct glare attempted to melt the luscious, pure surface of drifted new snow. It was a fairy-tale world, child-like and funny. Boughs of trees adorned with thick pillows, so fluffy someone must have plumped them up; the ground a series of humps and mounds, beneath which slinking underbrush or outcrops of rock lay hidden; a landscape of crouching, cowering gnomes in droll disguises—it was comic to behold, straight out of a book of fairy tales. But if there was something roguish and fantastic about the immediate vicinity through which you laboriously made your way, the towering statues of snow-clad Alps, gazing down from the distance, awakened in you feelings of the sublime and holy."

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January 4, 2013 - 6:00am
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