How silently, and with a feather’s grace He takes the blinding slopes of glittering ice,
Now swift, now slow, now curving left or right Over the reaches of a world turned white,
A sweep, a sigh, a surge of ecstasy, Downward, and on, a heart set suddenly free,
Leaping and flowing, patterned like a rhyme, A bird of air, a moment loosed from Time . . .
Daniel Whitehead Hicky's "The Skier" follows a single skier as he glides down a snowy mountain, and the whole poem feels like one long, uninterrupted run. The speaker watches from a distance, never describing his own thoughts, yet the pleasure of the descent comes through clearly. The skier moves "silently" and "with a feather's grace," curving left and right across a world that has been turned white. The repeated "now swift, now slow" mimics the rhythm of the turns.
What the poem captures best is a feeling of release. The skier's heart is "suddenly free," and by the end he is compared to "a bird of air" and "a moment loosed from Time." The rhyming couplets help here, since each pair of lines seems to swoop into the next, much like the skier himself. The mood is light, joyful, and almost dreamlike, as if speed and snow could briefly lift a person out of ordinary life.