"Winter Morning--Long Beach, Washington" Photograph by James A. Tweedie‘Early Morning Winter Walk’ and Other Poetry by James A. Tweedie The Society March 10, 2019 Poetry 19 Comments Early Morning Winter Walk Footprints follow like a shadow as I walk Through early morning snow as white as powdered chalk. Dragon-steam appears with each expired breath Embraced by frigid-fingered air as cold as death. Crystal-laden dune grass bows beneath its load And ice-etched, frozen puddles line the frosty road. Tree limbs rimed in tatted lace-like filigree Host winter birds engaged in witty repartee Beach path slithers like an alabaster snake As dawn-light stirs the sleeping, ice-bound world awake. Rising surf wipes white-washed beach sand slate-board clean As Eos bathes the morning clouds in opaline. Dayspring fantasy—a fleeting moment in A dream world made of diamond-crusted porcelain. Winter Thunderstorm A micro-second flash of arcing light _Explodes the silent, moonless, midnight sky, _Illuminates the heavens, blinds the eye, _Outshines the stars, and vanquishes the night. I count, “One thousand one, one thousand two…” _As splintered shards of shattered air descend, _With crackle-rattle-rumble-roar, and rend _The ear—a winter storm is passing through. A gust of wind, a sudden, breathless pause; _The click of scattered hail admixed with snow, _As strobe-lit clouds recede, and end the show _With distant, fading, thunderous applause. At dawn, a cloudless sky, the storm is gone, Except for hailstones blanketing the lawn. James A. Tweedie is a recently retired pastor living in Long Beach, Washington. He likes to walk on the beach with his wife. He has written and self-published four novels and a collection of short stories. He has several hundred unpublished poems tucked away in drawers. NOTE TO READERS: If you enjoyed this poem or other content, please consider making a donation to the Society of Classical Poets. The Society of Classical Poets does not endorse any views expressed in individual poems or commentary. CODEC Stories:Share this:Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Click to print (Opens in new window)Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)Click to share on WhatsApp (Opens in new window)Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window) 19 Responses E. V. March 10, 2019 Excellent! Both of these are beautiful. I enjoyed reading them. Reply Peter Hartley March 10, 2019 I really liked these two offerings.Both are very atmospheric and I nearly had to put my overcoat on after the first. I particularly liked the “splintered shards of shattered air”. The kind of poetry that I particularly enjoy, instantly intelligible, with very strong metaphor that doesn’t go over the top. Reply James A. Tweedie March 10, 2019 Keep warm, Peter. Spring is on the way! And thank you for the kind words. I’m glad you like that particular phrase. I like it, too. Reply Sally Cook March 10, 2019 Dear James Tweedie – As always I admire your metaphoric skills and precise vocabulary. You create the scene, and are therereporting all with all your highly developed senses. In the first poem, I can almost find myself there, walking with you. This is an undeniable skill. But there is something about your meter in that poem which makes me stumble when I should glide. Since I find it difficult to describe, may I resort to showing you what I mean? Early Morning Winter Walk Footprints follow like a shadow as I walk Through morning snow as white as powdered chalk. Dragon-steam with each expired breath Is gripped by frigidair as cold as death. Stiff crystal-dune grass bows beneath its load And ice-etched, frozen puddles line the road. Tree limbs reach, rimed in tatted filigree Host birds engaged in witty repartee The beach path slithers, alabaster snake, As dawn-light stirs the ice-bound world awake. Surf wipes the white-washed beach sand slate-board clean As Eos bathes the clouds in opaline. A dayspring fantasy—brief moment in A dream world made of jeweled porcelain. This is not at all the case with “Winter Thunderstorm”, which I prefer but only because of the awkward meter of “Early Morning Winter Walk”. However, there is much to be praised in both poems. Your prefise vocabulary, and the pictures you paint have much to offer. Thank you for sharing them. Reply James A. Tweedie March 10, 2019 Sally, I’m glad you raised the issue. The meter in Early Morning Winter Walk is precise and intentional. It is, in fact, a collection of seven rhymed metrically-identical hexameter couplets, with the first line of each couplet beginning with a trochee and the second with an iamb. It is, I suppose, an experiment. Although it may, at first glance, appear to be a sonnet, it is not a sonnet and not intended to be one. It does not, of course, flow as smoothly as iambic pentameter (which is featured in the second poem and which IS a sonnet) but I am quite satisfied with the result. It reads best, I think, when the lines are read as a series of couplets. If someone knows of a poem with a similar metrical structure I would be interested to see it. Reply C.B. Anderson March 10, 2019 Honestly, I find nothing wrong with the meter. We can’t expect every iambic line to begin with a pure iamb. In fact trochees are often substituted for initial iambs: Once in a while the tinker comes to town would be an example of this. But that’s not what you have done — you have simply omitted the initial unaccented syllable. The practice is fairly common, and I think there is actually a technical name for it, which I cannot remember. Anyway, metrical experimentation is not a bad thing if one is aware of it, one is in control, and especially if it is done consistently throughout the poem. I’ve done this many a time and usually think myself rather clever for having done so. For editors who are hostile to rhyme, it is often possible to slip blank verse with complicated metrical structures past them without them being any the wiser. James A. Tweedie March 10, 2019 E.V. Thank you for your “complimentary” comment. I’m glad it finally came through! Reply David Paul Behrens March 10, 2019 These poems are very descriptive, colorful, and enjoyable to read. Reply Alexander Ream March 10, 2019 When I was a young man, I’d go for a walk in the winter. Rarely was there snow; it was the American South. I called it my winter hike, because we lived in the country. Your poem recalled that thought – as well as Robert Frost’s poem about choosing the road less travelled. And it has made all the difference. Reply Mark Stone March 10, 2019 James, Both poems sparkle with beauty. However, like Sally, I stumbled over the meter of the first one. “Footprints follow like a shadow” creates a solid expectation of trochaic meter throughout. One way to prevent such a stumble would be to take the first syllable of each even-numbered line and make it the last syllable of the previous line. Then you would have trochaic meter throughout, and no disappointed expectations. It would work everywhere except lines 3 & 4, but you could revise those lines to make it work. Here’s what I mean: Footprints follow like a shadow as I walk through Early morning snow as white as powdered chalk. Dragon-steam appears with each expired breath em- braced by frigid-fingered air as cold as death. Crystal-laden dune grass bows beneath its load and Ice-etched, frozen puddles line the frosty road. Tree limbs rimed in tatted lace-like filigree host Winter birds engaged in witty repartee. Beach path slithers like an alabaster snake as Dawn-light stirs the sleeping, ice-bound world awake. Rising surf wipes white-washed beach sand slate-board clean as Eos bathes the morning clouds in opaline. Dayspring fantasy—a fleeting moment in a Dream world made of diamond-crusted porcelain. Reply James A. Tweedie March 11, 2019 Mark, you have caught a way to demonstrate the way I intended the poem to be read. Well done. As we all know, poetry is not always written to be read line by line. It often curves in and around itself as my sonnet does in line 7/8. The “Stumble” you and Sally refer to is not the fault of the poem but of the preformed expectation the reader brings to it. Sally brought the expectation of pentameter and you brought the expectation of initial trochees. Each of you reformed the verse to make it work for you. I have no problem with that. But from my perspective, the poem is exactly the way I intended it to be. Frankly, I have been getting somewhat bored cranking out iambic pentameter. Expect more experimentation in the future. I will eagerly await your reaction to it! Thanks, by the way, for your input (and Sally for her creative re-write). You honor me with your thoughtful commentary. Reply James Sale March 11, 2019 I think these are lovely poems and also that the discussion of the meter is a little irrelevant; it is important to read for meaning first, and not to start expecting a meter in which we want to straitjacket the poem. The poet is not, anyway, always the best judge of their own meter: is ‘Footprints’ a trochee? Seems almost, or nearly, a spondee to me. But actually, is that important? What is beautiful are some of the wonderful images James Tweedie creates: the alabaster snake, for example, and I love the rhyme, or is it pararhyme, of ‘porcelain/in’, depending on how we pronounce these words. Wonderful stuff – well done James. Reply James A. Tweedie March 11, 2019 James, Thank you for the compliments. I am also tickled to read your reference to the rhyme for “porcelain.” I originally rhymed that final couplet as follows: Dream-like fantasy—a fleeting moment when The world is made of diamond-crusted porcelain. =The word “when” rhymes with the way I casually pronounce “porcelain.” But a friend pointed out that it was only a near rhyme, and not precise. I then researched the word in a dozen different dictionaries and found only one that listed it as rhyming with “when.” There were several other listed pronunciations but the overwhelming consensus was that it is to be pronounced as I now have it in the poem, rhyming with “in.” Since it is a borrowed word from the French, and because of the wide variety of ways in which it can be pronounced (including rhyming with “pain”) I chose the one I hoped would be most universally embraced. It seems that any choice of a rhyme for this word would be considered a “near rhyme” by somebody or other. I suspect that even in France there may be regional variations. In any case, I spent twenty times more time and effort (literally days) working on that single couplet than I did on the rest of the poem–because of my desire to find a compatible rhyme for “porcelain!” Language is a funny thing, isn’t it? Especially when we are dealing with cross-cultural, cross-regional variations in syllabic accents and pronunciation. Your reference to it made me smile! Reply James Sale March 12, 2019 Yes, it was a hard rhyme to find, but it might be a perfect rhyme; it’s one of those words where there are large variations in pronunciation. Of course, I loved its unexpectedness!! Great work – keep going! Sally Cook March 11, 2019 Dear James Tweedie – As in your response to my “Star Needles”, your description of a winter walk will stay with me. Thanks for your thoughtful and measured response to all of our comments. Perhaps mine may be a non-conventional way of going at meter, but these are my thoughts on it: As the world is composed of rhymes and rhythms; both universal and personal. various people respond to these in individual ways. There is certainly much to be said for experimentation, and that was not what bothered me about your meter. It was rather the fact that my response to the rhythms was so different from yours. Among other things, I particularly love sonnets, couplets, and interesting rhyme arrangements, all of which lie within my rhythmic pattern. You are an accomplished poet with many fine accoutrements to your work, and I will continue, as always, to look forward to any and all of your experiments, and to your more conventional poems. I have not as yet seen any poem by you that did not contain a plethora of wise and sensitive nuggets. Reply James A. Tweedie March 11, 2019 Sally, You are very kind. Thank you. Reply David Watt March 12, 2019 These poems display a skillful use of metaphor, and just the right balance of alliteration. Above all, they are wonderfully descriptive. Reply Jeff Nicholson March 15, 2019 Thank you, Mr. Tweedie, for sharing these beautiful poems filled with vivid imagery! I know the Long Beach Peninsula fairly well and would like to have seen it in this winter array. Though rural Battle Ground is not far, we did not receive as much in the way of frozen precipitation this time around. Reply Julia Shaw May 26, 2019 I enjoy all your poems that I have read. This one about winter is superb! I live in SC and we almost never get these types of winter walks. I would love to take this walk with you. Last December 2018 we had a 5-inch wet snow that ruined many trees and beautiful vines in our front yard. I really loved your poem America the Beautiful. Keep writing for all of us that love great poetry! Reply Leave a Reply Cancel ReplyYour email address will not be published.CommentName* Email* Website Captcha loading...In order to pass the CAPTCHA please enable JavaScript. Notify me of follow-up comments by email. Notify me of new posts by email. Δ This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
Peter Hartley March 10, 2019 I really liked these two offerings.Both are very atmospheric and I nearly had to put my overcoat on after the first. I particularly liked the “splintered shards of shattered air”. The kind of poetry that I particularly enjoy, instantly intelligible, with very strong metaphor that doesn’t go over the top. Reply
James A. Tweedie March 10, 2019 Keep warm, Peter. Spring is on the way! And thank you for the kind words. I’m glad you like that particular phrase. I like it, too. Reply
Sally Cook March 10, 2019 Dear James Tweedie – As always I admire your metaphoric skills and precise vocabulary. You create the scene, and are therereporting all with all your highly developed senses. In the first poem, I can almost find myself there, walking with you. This is an undeniable skill. But there is something about your meter in that poem which makes me stumble when I should glide. Since I find it difficult to describe, may I resort to showing you what I mean? Early Morning Winter Walk Footprints follow like a shadow as I walk Through morning snow as white as powdered chalk. Dragon-steam with each expired breath Is gripped by frigidair as cold as death. Stiff crystal-dune grass bows beneath its load And ice-etched, frozen puddles line the road. Tree limbs reach, rimed in tatted filigree Host birds engaged in witty repartee The beach path slithers, alabaster snake, As dawn-light stirs the ice-bound world awake. Surf wipes the white-washed beach sand slate-board clean As Eos bathes the clouds in opaline. A dayspring fantasy—brief moment in A dream world made of jeweled porcelain. This is not at all the case with “Winter Thunderstorm”, which I prefer but only because of the awkward meter of “Early Morning Winter Walk”. However, there is much to be praised in both poems. Your prefise vocabulary, and the pictures you paint have much to offer. Thank you for sharing them. Reply
James A. Tweedie March 10, 2019 Sally, I’m glad you raised the issue. The meter in Early Morning Winter Walk is precise and intentional. It is, in fact, a collection of seven rhymed metrically-identical hexameter couplets, with the first line of each couplet beginning with a trochee and the second with an iamb. It is, I suppose, an experiment. Although it may, at first glance, appear to be a sonnet, it is not a sonnet and not intended to be one. It does not, of course, flow as smoothly as iambic pentameter (which is featured in the second poem and which IS a sonnet) but I am quite satisfied with the result. It reads best, I think, when the lines are read as a series of couplets. If someone knows of a poem with a similar metrical structure I would be interested to see it. Reply
C.B. Anderson March 10, 2019 Honestly, I find nothing wrong with the meter. We can’t expect every iambic line to begin with a pure iamb. In fact trochees are often substituted for initial iambs: Once in a while the tinker comes to town would be an example of this. But that’s not what you have done — you have simply omitted the initial unaccented syllable. The practice is fairly common, and I think there is actually a technical name for it, which I cannot remember. Anyway, metrical experimentation is not a bad thing if one is aware of it, one is in control, and especially if it is done consistently throughout the poem. I’ve done this many a time and usually think myself rather clever for having done so. For editors who are hostile to rhyme, it is often possible to slip blank verse with complicated metrical structures past them without them being any the wiser.
James A. Tweedie March 10, 2019 E.V. Thank you for your “complimentary” comment. I’m glad it finally came through! Reply
David Paul Behrens March 10, 2019 These poems are very descriptive, colorful, and enjoyable to read. Reply
Alexander Ream March 10, 2019 When I was a young man, I’d go for a walk in the winter. Rarely was there snow; it was the American South. I called it my winter hike, because we lived in the country. Your poem recalled that thought – as well as Robert Frost’s poem about choosing the road less travelled. And it has made all the difference. Reply
Mark Stone March 10, 2019 James, Both poems sparkle with beauty. However, like Sally, I stumbled over the meter of the first one. “Footprints follow like a shadow” creates a solid expectation of trochaic meter throughout. One way to prevent such a stumble would be to take the first syllable of each even-numbered line and make it the last syllable of the previous line. Then you would have trochaic meter throughout, and no disappointed expectations. It would work everywhere except lines 3 & 4, but you could revise those lines to make it work. Here’s what I mean: Footprints follow like a shadow as I walk through Early morning snow as white as powdered chalk. Dragon-steam appears with each expired breath em- braced by frigid-fingered air as cold as death. Crystal-laden dune grass bows beneath its load and Ice-etched, frozen puddles line the frosty road. Tree limbs rimed in tatted lace-like filigree host Winter birds engaged in witty repartee. Beach path slithers like an alabaster snake as Dawn-light stirs the sleeping, ice-bound world awake. Rising surf wipes white-washed beach sand slate-board clean as Eos bathes the morning clouds in opaline. Dayspring fantasy—a fleeting moment in a Dream world made of diamond-crusted porcelain. Reply
James A. Tweedie March 11, 2019 Mark, you have caught a way to demonstrate the way I intended the poem to be read. Well done. As we all know, poetry is not always written to be read line by line. It often curves in and around itself as my sonnet does in line 7/8. The “Stumble” you and Sally refer to is not the fault of the poem but of the preformed expectation the reader brings to it. Sally brought the expectation of pentameter and you brought the expectation of initial trochees. Each of you reformed the verse to make it work for you. I have no problem with that. But from my perspective, the poem is exactly the way I intended it to be. Frankly, I have been getting somewhat bored cranking out iambic pentameter. Expect more experimentation in the future. I will eagerly await your reaction to it! Thanks, by the way, for your input (and Sally for her creative re-write). You honor me with your thoughtful commentary. Reply
James Sale March 11, 2019 I think these are lovely poems and also that the discussion of the meter is a little irrelevant; it is important to read for meaning first, and not to start expecting a meter in which we want to straitjacket the poem. The poet is not, anyway, always the best judge of their own meter: is ‘Footprints’ a trochee? Seems almost, or nearly, a spondee to me. But actually, is that important? What is beautiful are some of the wonderful images James Tweedie creates: the alabaster snake, for example, and I love the rhyme, or is it pararhyme, of ‘porcelain/in’, depending on how we pronounce these words. Wonderful stuff – well done James. Reply
James A. Tweedie March 11, 2019 James, Thank you for the compliments. I am also tickled to read your reference to the rhyme for “porcelain.” I originally rhymed that final couplet as follows: Dream-like fantasy—a fleeting moment when The world is made of diamond-crusted porcelain. =The word “when” rhymes with the way I casually pronounce “porcelain.” But a friend pointed out that it was only a near rhyme, and not precise. I then researched the word in a dozen different dictionaries and found only one that listed it as rhyming with “when.” There were several other listed pronunciations but the overwhelming consensus was that it is to be pronounced as I now have it in the poem, rhyming with “in.” Since it is a borrowed word from the French, and because of the wide variety of ways in which it can be pronounced (including rhyming with “pain”) I chose the one I hoped would be most universally embraced. It seems that any choice of a rhyme for this word would be considered a “near rhyme” by somebody or other. I suspect that even in France there may be regional variations. In any case, I spent twenty times more time and effort (literally days) working on that single couplet than I did on the rest of the poem–because of my desire to find a compatible rhyme for “porcelain!” Language is a funny thing, isn’t it? Especially when we are dealing with cross-cultural, cross-regional variations in syllabic accents and pronunciation. Your reference to it made me smile! Reply
James Sale March 12, 2019 Yes, it was a hard rhyme to find, but it might be a perfect rhyme; it’s one of those words where there are large variations in pronunciation. Of course, I loved its unexpectedness!! Great work – keep going!
Sally Cook March 11, 2019 Dear James Tweedie – As in your response to my “Star Needles”, your description of a winter walk will stay with me. Thanks for your thoughtful and measured response to all of our comments. Perhaps mine may be a non-conventional way of going at meter, but these are my thoughts on it: As the world is composed of rhymes and rhythms; both universal and personal. various people respond to these in individual ways. There is certainly much to be said for experimentation, and that was not what bothered me about your meter. It was rather the fact that my response to the rhythms was so different from yours. Among other things, I particularly love sonnets, couplets, and interesting rhyme arrangements, all of which lie within my rhythmic pattern. You are an accomplished poet with many fine accoutrements to your work, and I will continue, as always, to look forward to any and all of your experiments, and to your more conventional poems. I have not as yet seen any poem by you that did not contain a plethora of wise and sensitive nuggets. Reply
David Watt March 12, 2019 These poems display a skillful use of metaphor, and just the right balance of alliteration. Above all, they are wonderfully descriptive. Reply
Jeff Nicholson March 15, 2019 Thank you, Mr. Tweedie, for sharing these beautiful poems filled with vivid imagery! I know the Long Beach Peninsula fairly well and would like to have seen it in this winter array. Though rural Battle Ground is not far, we did not receive as much in the way of frozen precipitation this time around. Reply
Julia Shaw May 26, 2019 I enjoy all your poems that I have read. This one about winter is superb! I live in SC and we almost never get these types of winter walks. I would love to take this walk with you. Last December 2018 we had a 5-inch wet snow that ruined many trees and beautiful vines in our front yard. I really loved your poem America the Beautiful. Keep writing for all of us that love great poetry! Reply
