Even in the daylight I can't see the sky

I'm currently studying for my AP English Literature test that I have on Thursday, and in doing so I have been reviewing the stories from James Joyce's Dubliners. We read this in class first semester, so it has been quite awhile since I have taken a look at the stories. One of my favorites from the collection, "The Dead", closes up the novel with one of the most moving selections I have read. In refreshing my memory of the story, I fell in love with the passage again, as seen below:

"He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight... It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen, and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Micheal Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the decent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."