Looking out the window this morning I remembered how mythic a snowfall could seem. Watching flakes fall at just that slight angle, giving my eyes a soft, glancing blow, ... these are the memories that stay with us when we walk outside of our door in July and feel the blazing sun and humid air blast at us. It can occur to us, then, the way Robert Frost refers to snow and winter as life giving and life taking simultaneously, a memory of an unknown present which keeps us from visualizing our surroundings in any objective way. His "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" readily comes to mind:

Whose woods these are I think I know.   

His house is in the village though;   

He will not see me stopping here   

To watch his woods fill up with snow.
The poetic subject is speaking both of his own journey and of that of his potential, although unseen, observer. This first stanza sets the stage for the rest of the poem, in which the traveller seeks out his path but cannot fully comprehend its end (even if he knows it will arrive when he does).

Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen also reflects on this notion of wintery haze in her poem «Inverno»:

Este inverno é longo gélido
E confuso

These first verses of the poem evidence her poetic voice's feelings about what the season symbolizes. In the second stanza her poetic voice speaks of how the poem cannot be born out of a "página em branco".

These are essential moments, ones in which I have to disagree with both poets. Although their poetic voices express the white of winter as it serves to paralise and defeat the poet's quest, I personally have found a writer's inspiration in winter. While uncomfortably and disquietingly lifeless at times, winter seeks to hand us the keys to Spring, to rejuvination, and the opposition to the striking heat we feel many months later. Perhaps it was this that they seeked out, and could never find until winter's end. Perhaps, looking out a window on a Tuesday morning to see winter's life unfold in frozen snow and roads iced over, they would have seen the friendly season I see.