"Allie sells cookies, covered in snowflakes."

Christmas decoration from Joan in 2009.

What is your favourite ‘snowflakes’ moment in literature? Tell me.

Mine is:

London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. –from Charles Dickens’s Bleak House.

The title of this post is a line from Ricky Garni’s poem “After 5 Inches of Snow 8 Inches of Facebook”.

Also see Mary A. Spytz’s beautiful handcrafted snowflakes at Fractal Snowflakes.

Every time you grab at love you will lose a snowflake of your memory.

-from Leonard Cohen’s “The Story Thus Far”

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Interestingly, one day after I wrote the above, I saw this:

Snowflake Google doodle.

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8 thoughts on “"Allie sells cookies, covered in snowflakes."”

Funny you should mention snowflakes
Yesterday I posted a new poem
Or rather a group of small poems
That seemed to me like snowflakes
That I called Snow Flakes in Spring
– yamabuki
http://yamabuki9.blogspot.com/2012/01/snow-flakes-in-spring.html

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What a coincidence, Y. I am re-reading the first few chapters of Dickens's Bleak House while reading his biography by Claire Tomalin. His sooty snowflakes in the very first paragraph of the novel struck me as perfectly realised. I don't encounter 'snowflakes' in literature often, although many poems have been written on the subject of 'snow' (one of my favourites is Wallace Stevens's “The Snow Man”. I hope to find more 'snowflakes' poetry. Perhaps with your knowledge you could help.

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Robert Abel kindly told me:

“There's a scene in one of Yukio Mishima's novels in which hero and lover escape in a rickshaw through snowflakes “as big as peonies.””

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Cyril pointed me to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's “Snow-flakes”. The line which interests me most is 'Slowly in silent syllables recorded' – how does one record mute syllables?

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