Welcome back to the Daily Poem here in the Close Reeds Podcast Network. I'm David Kern.

Hope everyone had a wonderful Martin Luther King Jr. Day yesterday and glad to be back with you,

bringing you another poem. The poem that I'm going to read today is by an English poet named Robert Bridges,

who lived from 1844 to 1930. And the poem is called London Snow. So I'll just dive right

into it and offer a few comments and then read it again. So again, Robert Bridges' poem, London Snow.

When men were all asleep, the snow came flying, in large white flakes falling on the city brown,

stealthily and perpetually settling and loosely lying, hushing the latest traffic of the drowsy town.

Deadening, muffling, stifling its murmurs failing,

lazily and incessantly floating down and down, silently

sifting the veiling road, roof and railing, hiding difference, making unevenness even, into

angles and crevices softly drifting and sailing. All night it fell, and when full inches seven,

it lay in the depth of its uncompacted lightness,

the clouds blew off from a high and frosty heaven,

and all woke earlier for the unaccustomed brightness of the winter dawning,

the strange unheavenly glare.

The eye marvelled, marveled at the dazzling whiteness. The ear hearkened to the stillness

of the solemn air. No sound of wheel rumbling nor of foot falling, and the busy morning cries came

thin and spare. Then boys I heard, as they went to school calling, they gathered up the crystal

manna to freeze their tongues with tasting,

their hands with snowballing, or rioted in a drift, plunging up to the knees, or peering up from under

the white moss wonder. Oh, look at the trees, they cried. Oh, look at the trees. With lessened

load a few carts creak and blunder following along the white deserted way,

...