You probably know these lines, either from Christina Rossettis poem of 1871 or, more likely, Hoists setting of them as a carol. I used one of them as the title of a book, "bleak" altered to "deep" by the publisher, who thought "bleak" too bleak. Which it might indeed be. Rossetti was melancholic, iced up with unversed emotion, with passions gone gelid that, reticent and gob stopped, couldn't quite state their names. She was a devout Anglo Catholic. Her worship at Christ Church in London's Camden Town fumed with incense and candles, ardent for the Eucharist. Ever virgin, dazzled and expectant, she posed for Annunciations by her brother Gabriel and his Pre-Raphaelite cohort. Critics say her prosody had its roots in nursery rhymes, the tick tock of fortunes and unravelings, of goblins vanquished, of witches made meek, of children saved and of children saving all—of things coming round upon themselves. Still, I say it was snow. She might have been cold, and then again she must have been misunderstood. Isn't that what children always and everywhere are—misunderstood? When I see snow falling, I hear a clock ticking; the clock next to the bed upon which my mother holds me, her heart its counterpoint; and the snow unwinds, sheathes and coils like drapery, like the shade that, as she leaves, cascades down the window sash. The clock gets lost in my own heartbeat and outside—you know this; you hear it ticking, swinging on its pendulum—the snow falls and will fall for as long as it takes to cover everything. A car will drive by, headlights tunneling, the tires a whir and then a rustle compressed to a sigh. There is a great