Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios. I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Thursday, December 5th, 2004. Today's poem comes from William Carlos Williams, and it's called Hunters in the Snow. I'll read it once, offer a few comments, and then read it one more time.

The overall picture is winter.

I see mountains in the background.

The return from the hunt.

It is toward evening.

From the left, sturdy hunters lead in their pack.

The inside hanging from a broken hinge is a stag, a crucifix between his antlers.

The cold inn yard is deserted, but for a huge bonfire that flares wind-driven, tended by women

who cluster about it. To the right, beyond the hill, is a pattern of skaters. Broigel, the painter, concerned with it

all, has chosen a winter-struck bush for his foreground to complete the picture.

If you hadn't been familiar with the source material or didn't recognize the title right off the bat, the final lines of this poem remind or reveal to us that this is an necphrasic poem. This is a poem about or describing another work of art. In this case, a painting by the Dutch master, Peter Broigel, the Elder, by the same name as

this poem, A Hunters in the Snow, or its alternate title, The Return of the Hunters. And it

depicts just that, a group of hunters in the foreground returning from a hunt in the snow,

and then opening on to a wide vista of

frozen ponds and ice skating. It looks like there's a group that's maybe ice fishing or even

curling. There are towns and trees and mountains stretching off for miles in the distance.

Williams, I think, was a fan of Borgel's work.

This is not the only ect phrasic poem he's written about one of his paintings.

He also has an ectrastic poem about the painting landscape with the fall of Icarus,

which is the same work that inspired W.H. Auden's poem, La Mouet de Beau's Art,

that poem that begins about suffering, they were never wrong, the old masters.

This is a poem that is difficult to read, especially aloud, which can be frustrating for

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