(At this point in the poem, the wizard Frost is perched in a frost-covered pine tree)
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Frost came down a little lower waved his mace again, and whispered to her more tenderly, more softly: "Are you warm?" -- "I'm warm, my dearest." Warm -- yet she is growing numb. Frost has touched her; he breathes into her face and scatters over her sharp needles from his white beard. And now he has come down and stands in front of her. "Are you warm?" he murmured once more, and suddenly turned into Proklushka (*her dead husband), and started to kiss her. The white haired wizard kissed her on the lips, the eyes, and the shoulders, and whispered to her the same sweet words which her lover whispered at wedding-time. And so happy was Dar'ya to listen to his sweet words...
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Excerpt from "Frost, the Red-Nosed," a poem by Nikolay (Nikolai) Nekrasov. In Nekrasov's poem, General Frost (or Moroz) is personified as a cruel wintry wizard, a Russian "Jack Frost" perhaps, wooing the widow Dar'ya as she gathers firewood after her husband's funeral, causing her to freeze to death.
Page from The Penguin Book of Russian Verse, first edition paperback (pubished by Penguin Books, Baltimore, MD, 1962).
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