The moon, with glacial, vacant eye, observes
winter reign vast and white on the hard ground;
night is an azure translucent and complete;
the wind, a knife, comes suddenly, stabs deep.
Yonder, on the horizons, the long tracks of frost
seem ever to pierce the expanses,
and stars of gold as far as the zenith,
amid the ether, ever higher, pierce the sky.
Villages huddled in the plains of Flanders,
near the moor, the rivers, the great forests,
between these two pale infinities shudder with cold
around old hearths, whose ashes they rake.