Given snow that doesn’t flinch to throw its pounds through heaven inch by inch, that sows a billion motes of chill into this ground no man defends; and given wind that won’t begin to tell us how it’s driven, where it fell from, what it’s meant to blow and which proud limbs the clouds want riven—no, not even why its howling whims have pardoned us this far—friend, given such, it’s hard to watch the black-eyed scarecrow miming care above our blighted garden: tonight he seems intent to wrack the soil and climb the air, to die, to crash his flimsy cross against this great grim passion in the sky.