The verse in May Swenson's "Snow in New York" which draws the speaker's reverie to its climax is the statement "Snow in New York is like poetry, or clothes made of roses."… It shocks in its combination of the ordinary and the unexpected: snow has been one of the surface subjects of the poem continuously, but "clothes made of roses" seems a sudden leap of the imagination. Of course, the poignance of the latter phrase strikes us as right because it extends the train of paradoxical or contrasting images Swenson has set in motion from the beginning of the poem…. And naturally, "clothes made of roses," by their seeming sheer impracticality, would fit right in with poetry as something one does not, ostensibly, "need," cannot "build" with, and probably would not use to "feed."

However, this same phrase possibly contains an allusion which not only serves to show...