It Snowed and It Snowed

Years and years ago, . . . when we rode the daft and happy hills bareback, it snowed and it snowed.

But here a small boy says: "It snowed last year, too. I made a snowman and my brother knocked it down and I knocked my brother down and then we had tea."

"But that was not the same snow," I say. "Our snow was not only shaken from white wash buckets down the sky,

it came shawling out of the ground and swam and drifted out of the arms and hands and bodies of the trees;

snow grew overnight on the roofs of the houses like a pure and grandfather moss, minutely-ivied the walls and settled on the postman, opening the gate, like a dumb, numb thunder-storm of white, torn Christmas cards."

Excerpted from A Child's Christmas in Wales, Dylan Thomas (him for whom Robert Zimmermann changed his name), 1914 - 1953

If you'd like to hear him reciting the whole poem himself, go here.