CRAVING FOR SNOW
What a rimy
and comely
winter wonderland,
As icy mess
onto my hand;
I eulogize its
charming guise.
Its allure is
ephemeral as
it melts on my
flesh so warm.
In this calignosity,
I have no fright,
Icicles nonchalantly
form as I stand.
The gleaming
snow falls from
up high,
In this winter
utopia.
I stand astounded
as I ogle/gaze upon glistening snow covered trees with
their chalky chroma.
Sprinkled in
Winter’s frosty
touch so blissfully august.
God immotiled
an ardor of
Winter’s charisma
within my
arcadian heart.
Winter Sunset -- James Thomas Watts
Among the groups referred to as Pelasgoi, the proto-Greek tribes who inhabited the land before the classical Hellenes, were the Arcadians who settled the central Peloponnese highlands. Even after Doric Greek dialects were introduced to the area, the Arcadians retained their own language. They were named after Arcas, the son of Zeus and Callisto, the daughter of king Lycaon. Zeus' wife Hera punished Callisto by transforming her into a bear, but Zeus hid his son from her wrath. Lycaon attempted to sacrifice his grandson to the gods, but Zeus intervened, restored Arcas, and turned Lycaon into the first werewolf. Arcas succeeded him as king. On a hunting expedition, he nearly slew his mother, but Zeus prevented him from shooting her by turning him into a bear as well. Then he transformed them into the constellations Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, the big and little bears. Hera finally got her revenge on them by asking her foster mother Tethys, the sister/wife of Oceanus and the daughter of Uranus the sky and Gaia the earth, to prevent the constellations from ever sinking below the horizon in order to receive water. Arcadia was the home of Pan the god of fields, groves, wooded glens, and mountain wilds, the son of Hermes and Penelopeia the wife of Odysseus (In her husband's long absence during and after the Trojan War, she slept with all 108 suitors and gave birth to Pan as a result. Odysseus slew all her lovers and banished her to Mantineia in Arcadia. At least that was how Pausanias told it, contrary to her traditional association with marital fidelity.) Due to the region's isolation, in the Renaissance it became synonymous with unspoiled, harmonious wilderness, especially after the highly influential 1504 prosimetrum (prose-verse combination) "Arcadia" by Jacopo Sannazaro, and the 2 long prose pastoral romances by Sir Philip Sidney later in the century.
ReplyDelete