Seeing Shadows

This groundhog day I don't need a pampered Punxsutawney Phil to tell me we have more days of winter coming.  If last weekend's snow storm wasn't enough, today's wintery mix sealed the deal.  But I’m done with talking about the cold or thinking about the cold. Now, I just deal with the cold and hold on until spring. And despite the annual ritual with Phil and his cousins across the country, I don’t need a woodchuck, or any other oversized squirrel dictating the future. After all, that’s the job of a poet, not a marmot, as Shelley so thoroughly noted in his Defense of Poetry:

"Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present."

So, in honor of poets who have written of shadows, here is one of my favorites from Robert Louis Stevenson’s “A Child’s Garden of Verses.” Oh, and to all you whistle-pigs out there, try scratching words in the dirt next year, because us poets will fiercely defend our role as harbingers of things to come.

My Shadow

I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me,
And what can be the use of him is more than I can see.
He is very, very like me from the heels up to the head;
And I see him jump before me, when I jump into my bed.

The funniest thing about him is the way he likes to grow--
Not at all like proper children, which is always very slow;
For he sometimes shoots up taller like an india-rubber ball,
And he sometimes goes so little that there's none of him at all.

He hasn't got a notion of how children ought to play,
And can only make a fool of me in every sort of way.
He stays so close behind me, he's a coward you can see;
I'd think shame to stick to nursie as that shadow sticks to me!

One morning, very early, before the sun was up,
I rose and found the shining dew on every buttercup;
But my lazy little shadow, like an arrant sleepy-head,
Had stayed at home behind me and was fast asleep in bed.