Snow on snow

Here is William Diaper in 1722, translating Oppian’s Halieuticks (a Greek epic poem on the loves of the fishes):

As when soft Snows, brought down by
Western Gales,
Silent descend and spread on all the Vales . . .
Nature bears all one Face, looks coldly bright,
And mourns her lost Variety in White.
Unlike themselves the Objects glare around,
And with false Rays the dazzled Sight
confound.

Lost variety is the nub: before it is anything else, snow is Nature’s alienation-effect, making all things look the same and ‘unlike themselves’ — even while we watch, or else behind our backs, noiselessly. But snow also carries contrary meanings: an image of sameness, and equally of variousness and flux, of a reality that is ‘incorrigibly plural’ in the words of Louis MacNeice’s ‘Snow’.

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