On That Darkest Evening of the Year

A Winter Solstice at Stonehenge

Tomorrow is the Winter Solstice, marking the shortest day and longest night of the year, which is a profound and ancient observation and is often used in poetry. It represents darkness, reflection, and the promise of the returning light.

I've written before in detail about Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." It is one of the most famous poems of the winter season, perfectly capturing the reflective, quiet, and even dangerous allure of the solstice darkness. It is the poem that Frost said was his "best bid for remembrance" and it is one that almost every American student encounters.

"My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near.
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year."

It is often read as a poem about the tension between duty and life and the call of rest and the oblivion of death. My interpretation is more on the duty and life side, but you will find those who say death and even contemplating suicide are in the mix. Frost would disagree.

Interestingly, he wrote the poem on a June day.

Another Frost poem is "An Old Man's Winter Night" which focuses on isolation and quiet contemplation in the rural winter.

Here are some other poems. excerpted, which are about this time of winter.

"The Shortest Day" by Susan Cooper is a -oftquoted poem about the Winter Solstice, often read at celebrations of the day. Cooper is known more for her fantasy series The Dark Is Rising, which features the solstice as a central mystical moment.

So the Shortest Day came and the year died
And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world
Came people singing, dancing,
To drive the dark away.
They lighted candles in the winter trees;
They hung their homes with evergreen;
They burned beseeching fires all night long
To keep the year alive...

In "Little Gidding,"from The Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot, there is the image of the deepest winter and the unique light it holds.

Midwinter spring is its own season
Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown,
Suspended in time, between pole and tropic.
When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire,
The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches,
In windless cold that is the heart's heat,
Reflecting in a watery mirror
A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon.

Though "To Know the Dark" by Wendell Berry is a 4-line poem that doesn't name the solstice, its central theme speaks directly to the experience of the longest night and learning to embrace the necessary period of deep darkness and rest.

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

"A Child's Christmas in Wales" by Dylan Thomas is a longer prose poem focused on Christmas.

All the Christmases roll down towards the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street; and they stop at the rim of the ice-edged, fish-freezing waves, and I plunge my hands in the snow and bring out whatever I can find.

"In the Bleak Midwinter" (AKA "A Christmas Carol") by Christina Rossetti is a poem later set to music as a Christmas carol, which captures the stark cold of the season.

In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter, long ago.