In the bleak midwinter

Uncredited illustration of Old Man Winter, used for "Winter”
in Child Life: A Collection of Poems, edited by John Greenleaf Whittier

The winter solstice comes this week. It is an astronomical phenomenon that marks the shortest day and the longest night of the year. This is the December solstice in the Northern Hemisphere and the June solstice in the Southern Hemisphere.

The winter solstice is also known as the hiemal or hibernal solstice, Midwinter, Yule, the Longest Night and Jólo.

"Midwinter" seems odd to Americans since it often doesn't seem like winter until December in many parts of the country, so to have December 21 as a midpoint seems wrong. (I always felt the same about "midsummer" - as in Shakespeare's play.) The winter solstice can also be known as midwinter because the days get longer after the solstice, but it doesn't mean that it gets any warmer. In fact, for me in the northeast, the bleakest part of winter is January or February.

Christina Rossetti was a Pre-Raphaelite poet who published her most famous collection, Goblin Market and Other Poems in 1862 when she was 31 years old. "In the Bleak Midwinter" is probably her most famous poem. She first published it under the title "A Christmas Carol," and it does have a songlike quality.

The first stanza is the best-known:

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.

I think that people today might recognize her poem as a Christmas carol and it is a Nativity poem.

In the Greek myths, the goddess of the harvest, Demeter, had her daughter Persephone kidnapped by Hades, lord of the underworld. It so depressed her, that she became despondent that she could not care for the lands, and winter took over. After a deal was struck with Hades, Persephone was allowed to return to the Earth for six months of the year at which time the lands thrived, but every six months she would return to the underworld and the seasons would change again.

Though some people 

Maybe you should make a Viking toast for the solstice.

Here is the rest of Rosetti's poem.

Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him, nor earth sustain; 

Heaven and earth shall flee away when He comes to reign.

In the bleak midwinter a stable place sufficed

The Lord God Almighty, Jesus Christ.

Enough for Him, whom cherubim, worship night and day,

Breastful of milk, and a mangerful of hay;

Enough for Him, whom angels fall before,

The ox and ass and camel which adore.

Angels and archangels may have gathered there,

Cherubim and seraphim thronged the air;

But His mother only, in her maiden bliss,

Worshipped the beloved with a kiss.

What can I give Him, poor as I am?

If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb;

If I were a Wise Man, I would do my part;

Yet what I can I give Him: give my heart.

  

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The Approach of Winter

Approach of Winter
by William Carlos Williams

The half-stripped trees
struck by a wind together, 
bending all,
the leaves flutter drily
and refuse to let go
or driven like hail
stream bitterly out to one side
and fall
where the salvias, hard carmine,—
like no leaf that ever was—
edge the bare garden.


William Carlos Williams was born in Rutherford, New Jersey in 1883. A highly influential figure in twentieth-century poetry, he was the author of Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems and many other works. Williams was also a physician. He died in 1963.

Williams was known as an Imagist poet. “Imagism was born in England and America in the early twentieth century. A reactionary movement against romanticism and Victorian poetry, Imagism emphasized simplicity, clarity of expression, and precision through the use of exacting visual images.”    

Read more about the history of the Imagist movement.


  

Enter Winter

Stonehenge on a Winter Solstice

The Winter Solstice has just slipped into place and it may look and feel like winter where you are now or it may be the start of summer if you are in the Southern Hemisphere.

In years past, I have usually posted something about winter and poetry. Around the start of December, my analytics usually show that people search and find posts and prompts about winter. So, this year I'm going to start the season with this anthology post of past winter posts.

Do you ever have a mind of winter? I posted once about that idea and Wallace Steven's poem "The Snow Man"

I have created mini-winter poem anthologies too. I posted a few winter poems by Mary Oliver and others in 2016 and some poems to move you into winter on the solstice.   

There are some thoughts on winter by Williams, Thoreau and Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson's poem about the snow that never drifts - which I will admit to still not quite figuring out, though I enjoy rereading it.

I think I have written more than once about Robert Frost's solstice when he stopped in the woods to watch the snow fall. That is one of the best-known American poems. I found it interesting that he sat down to write it on a warm June day.   

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

Somehow winter haiku always seems very appropriate to the season - spare and quiet like the day after a snowstorm.  

You should not forget in this time when some people, due to holidays, the new year, and Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) fall into a depression that tending your inner garden in winter can be aided by reading and writing poems.    

You can browse all my posts about winter at my tag for"winter."

I hope you have a good winter season filled with health, joy, and poetry.

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The Snow That Never Drifts

The winter solstice is near but cold weather and snow have already fallen in many places, including on the holly outside my window.

This is a poem that seems to be about snow by Emily Dickinson.

The Snow that never drifts —

The transient, fragrant snow

That comes a single time a Year

Is softly driving now —

So thorough in the Tree

At night beneath the star

That it was February’s Foot

Experience would swear —

Like Winter as a Face

We stern and former knew

Repaired of all but Loneliness

By Nature’s Alibi —

Were every storm so spice

The Value could not be —

We buy with contrast — Pang is good

As near as memory —

When I was presented with this poem in a college class, it was given as an example of the puzzling nature of many of Emily's poems. The professor asked us: What kind of snow never drifts? Is snow ever fragrant? Is this poem really about snow?

My first answer would be that she was thinking of a "snowfall" of white petals from a tree in spring. It's a common image in haiku.

But what about her reference to February and winter? (And "February's Foot," I thought - what's that all about?) Does she really mean this snow is only figurative?

Maybe a tree bloomed in February (In Amherst, Massachusetts? Hmmm...) but got hit with a winter blast and lost all its blossoms. If every storm was as "spice" (scented), "the Value could not be" - What could it not be?

"We buy with contrast — Pang is good / As near as memory —"  Do we 

Oh, Emily. If only we could chat over some cake and tea. We have so many questions.

What is your interpretation of this poem?
Post a comment answer below.

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February Words

I was looking through some February poems and it was rather depressing. Most of them were filled with rather grim winter images.

"Afternoon In February" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow starts out like this:

The day is ending,
The night is descending;
The marsh is frozen,
The river dead.

and I didn't want to go further.

Things are not much better in "February: The Boy Breughel" by Norman Dubie with its deadly nature imagery.

The birches stand in their beggar's row:
Each poor tree
Has had its wrists nearly
Torn from the clear sleeves of bone,
These icy trees
Are hanging by their thumbs...

And a fox crosses through snow
Down a hill; then, he runs,
He has overcome something white
Beside a white bush, he shakes
It twice, and as he turns
For the woods, the blood in the snow

There's only a brief line of hope because those poor tortured birch trees are "Under a sun / That will begin to heal them soon."

The only hopeful February poems I cam across concerned themselves with thinking beyond February.

Jane Kenyon was looking ahead in her "February: Thinking of Flowers"

Now wind torments the field,
Turning the white surface back
On itself, back and back on itself,
Like an animal licking a wound.

Nothing but white the air, the light;
Only one brown milkweed pod
Bobbing in the gully, smallest
Brown boat on the immense tide.

A single green sprouting thing
Would restore me...

Then think of the tall delphinium,
Swaying, or the bee when it comes
To the tongue of the burgundy lily.

I saw my first green sprouting things - crocuses and the tops of daffodils - this past week. It is a hopeful thing.

And Ted Kooser in his poem "Late February" must also have been thinking on one of those early warm days when:

...by mid-afternoon
the snow is no more
than a washing
strewn over the yards,
the bedding rolled in knots
and leaking water,
the white shirts lying
under the evergreens.

But it's a brief respite from winter, a false spring and:

by five o'clock
the chill of sundown,
darkness, the blue TVs
flashing like storms
in the picture windows,
the yards gone gray,
the wet dogs barking
at nothing.

And in his final lines, those hopeful green things of early spring take an unexpected and horrible turn.

Far off
across the cornfields
staked for streets and sewers,
the body of a farmer
missing since fall
will show up
in his garden tomorrow,
as unexpected
as a tulip

Oh February, "month of despair" as Margaret Atwood describes it "with a skewered heart in the centre," you need some optimism.

I think dire thoughts, and lust for French fries
with a splash of vinegar.
Cat, enough of your greedy whining
and your small pink bumhole.
Off my face! You're the life principle,
more or less, so get going
on a little optimism around here.
Get rid of death. Celebrate increase. Make it be spring.

 Yes!

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Moving with the Earth Into Winter with a Few Poems

frost flowers on my car window

A Winter Solstice actually occurs twice a year, once in December in the Northern Hemisphere (also called December solstice and Midwinter) and once in June in the Southern Hemisphere (also called June solstice). In the Northern Hemisphere, it is usually December 21 or 22 and in the Southern Hemisphere, it's usually June 20 or 21.

In 2010, the solstice and Full Moon coincided and in 2009 I wrote a post about another coincidence of a Full Moon on December 31 to end the year that was also the second full moon of the month, and so was considered a "Blue Moon.”

Solstices have long been celebrated and written about. It is the shortest day of the year and the longest night, and it marks the astronomical first day of winter.

solstice sunrise at Stonehenge

Solstices are one of the oldest known holidays in human history. Anthropologists believe that solstice celebrations go back at least 30,000 years.

You probably know that many of the most ancient stone structures made by human beings were designed to pinpoint the precise date of the solstice. The most famous example is the stone circles of Stonehenge which were placed to receive the first rays of the midwinter sun.

We often see winter - in everyday life and in poetry - as a depressing time of year. Death symbolism abounds. At least in northern climes, you tend to be confined indoors. Outside looks bare and dead. But solstice celebrations focus more on hope with the reversal of shortening days. It is more seen as a time to celebrate the rebirth of the year.

The word solstice derives from Latin sol (sun) and sistere (to stand still) since to the ancients the sun did seem to stand still now. In Greek mythology, the gods and goddesses had their meetings on the winter and summer solstices.

In many cultural histories, this is the time when virgin mothers give birth to sacred sons: Rhiannon to Pryderi, Isis to Horus, Demeter to Persephone and Mary to Jesus.

You can take a scientific look at the solstice. We know that as the Earth travels around the Sun in its orbit, the north-south position of the Sun changes over the course of the year. That is because of the changing orientation of the Earth's tilted rotation axes with respect to the Sun.  When we arrive at the points of maximum tilt (marked at the equator), we get the summer and winter solstice.

Two poems I found in my Full Moon and solstice search became models for a past writing prompt that uses the solstice (and perhaps the Full Moon) without falling into the cliches of winter and moon symbolism.

The first is "December Moon" from May Sarton's collection Coming into Eighty.

The second model is Mary Oliver's poem "Herons in Winter in the Frozen Marsh" (from Owls and Other Fantasies: Poems and Essays)

William Carlos Williams' "Approach of Winter" says:

The half-stripped trees
struck by a wind together,
bending all,
the leaves flutter drily
and refuse to let go
or driven like hail
stream bitterly out to one side
and fall
where the salvias, hard carmine,—
like no leaf that ever was—
edge the bare garden.

Some people are sad or suffer from SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) in winter, so as an antidote have your own solstice celebrations and try to focus on the hope of this day starting the reversal of shortening days. It is as a time to celebrate the rebirth of the year.

How about this stanza from "Toward the Winter Solstice" by Timothy Steele.

Some wonder if the star of Bethlehem
Occurred when Jupiter and Saturn crossed;
It’s comforting to look up from this roof
And feel that, while all changes, nothing’s lost,
To recollect that in antiquity
The winter solstice fell in Capricorn
And that, in the Orion Nebula,
From swirling gas, new stars are being born.

Here are a few more to read that have a range of reactions to the Winter Solstice.

"Again a Solstice" by Jennifer Chang
"Fairbanks Under the Solstice" by John Haines
You can also listen to Robert Graves' "To Juan at the Winter Solstice"

Have a great solstice, winter, and new year!

A Series of Fortunate Poetry Events 2

a young Robert Frost

In my earlier post, I wrote about the actual Series of Unfortunate Events book and TV series and how poetry enters the story with some fortunate events. (part 1)

Another fortunate event this month was that on January first, a huge cache of too-long-copyrighted material entered the public domain.

One example is the best-known poem by Robert Frost, which might also be the best-known American poem - "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening."

The 1923 poem would have entered the public domain in 1999 because most creative works were protected for 75 years.  But a number of efforts to extend copyright protections for many categories of intellectual property have been enacted that extended that law. Because of heavy lobbying led by the Walt Disney Co., Congress passed the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, which retroactively extended copyright protection until Dec. 31, 2018.

But this month, poetry by Edna St. Vincent Millay, E.E. Cummings, William Carlos Williams, Rainer Maria Rilke, Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, Sukumar Ray, and Pablo Neruda have all entered the public domain. The new public domain volumes are Duino Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke (original German version) New Hampshire by Robert Frost, Spring and All and also the novel The Great American Novel by William Carlos Williams, Harmonium by Wallace Stevens, Tulips and Chimneys by E.E. Cummings and Poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Other literature now in the public domain includes The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran, The Complete Works of Anthony Trollope, George Bernard Shaw’s play Saint Joan, stories by Christie, Virginia Woolf, H.P. Lovecraft, Katherine Mansfield, and Ernest Hemingway and other works by Jane Austen, D.H. Lawrence, Edith Wharton, Jorge Luis Borges, Mikhail Bulgakov, Jean Cocteau, Italo Svevo, Aldous Huxley, Winston Churchill, G.K. Chesterton, Maria Montessori, Lu Xun, Joseph Conrad, Zane Grey, H.G. Wells, and Edgar Rice Burroughs.

I have written here about the inspiration for "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" and also about the oddity that Frost was writing this classic winter poem in summer.

Now I can reproduce the entirety of Frost’s poems from that period without permission or restriction. And you could print them in books, webpages, and on t-shirts, if you want.


Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

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.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

by Robert Frost (public domain)

Thoughts on Winter

Although Henry David Thoreau wrote little poetry, I find his essays and journal to be inspirational. He advised in his journal that we should “Take long walks in stormy weather or through deep snows in the fields and woods, if you would keep your spirits up. Deal with brute nature. Be cold and hungry and weary.”

I am a fan of winter walks and I especially like going out after a snowfall. The woods are whitewashed clean, and the snow muffles sounds. I like to follow the tracks of animals who have walked there before me that day.

Adam Gopnik's book Winter: Five Windows on the Season  is a meditation on the season via artists, poets, composers, writers, explorers, scientists, and thinkers, who have created our modern idea of winter. It goes to unlikely places, such as thinking about how snow science leads to existential questions of God and our place in the world.

Do I love the winter season? No, it is my least favorite season. (Autumn is my favorite.) I often say that i want to retire to a place without winter, or at least with a much milder winter than my New Jersey ones. But I suspect i would miss winter after a time.

The Brain Pickings blog had a post about Thoreau finding inner warmth in this cold season, but here is a section from his journal that isn't about going for a walk in the snowy woods.

The wind has gently murmured through the blinds, or puffed with feathery softness against the windows, and occasionally sighed like a summer zephyr lifting the leaves along, the livelong night. The meadow-mouse has slept in his snug gallery in the sod, the owl has sat in a hollow tree in the depth of the swamp, the rabbit, the squirrel, and the fox have all been housed. The watch-dog has lain quiet on the hearth, and the cattle have stood silent in their stalls. The earth itself has slept, as it were its first, not its last sleep, save when some street-sign or wood-house door has faintly creaked upon its hinge, cheering forlorn nature at her midnight work, — the only sound awake twixt Venus and Mars, — advertising us of a remote inward warmth, a divine cheer and fellowship, where gods are met together, but where it is very bleak for men to stand. But while the earth has slumbered, all the air has been alive with feathery flakes descending, as if some northern Ceres reigned, showering her silvery grain over all the fields.

I identify with Thoreau's suggestion to walk in winter, but I also identify with curling up under a blanket inside and just observing the winter outside.

Here is Hank expanding on that winter walk:

There is nothing so sanative, so poetic, as a walk in the woods and fields even now, when I meet none abroad for pleasure. In the street and in society I am almost invariably cheap and dissipated, my life is unspeakably mean. No amount of gold or respectability would in the least redeem it, — dining with the Governor or a member of Congress!! But alone in distant woods or fields, I come to myself, I once more feel myself grandly related, and that cold and solitude are friends of mine. I suppose that this value, in my case, is equivalent to what others get by churchgoing and prayer. I thus dispose of the superfluous and see things as they are, grand and beautiful.

Poets have had much to say about winter. Mr. Shakespeare wrote:

Blow, blow, thou winter wind,
   Thou art not so unkind
      As man’s ingratitude;
   Thy tooth is not so keen,
Because thou art not seen,
      Although thy breath be rude. 

I feel more akin to the "Winter Trees" of William Carlos Williams and like them in this cold month I am protecting my buds from the season and sleepily waiting for spring.

All the complicated details
of the attiring and
the disattiring are completed!
A liquid moon
moves gently among
the long branches.
Thus having prepared their buds
against a sure winter
the wise trees
stand sleeping in the cold.

         

Tending Your Inner Garden in Winter

Albert Camus, from "Return to Tipassa" 

Albert Camus wrote in his essay "Return to Tipassa" that “In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer."  That invincible summer may have been where the "inner garden" of Rainer Maria Rilke grew.

Rilke is known for his poetry and also for his prolific and poetic letters. More than seven thousand of his letters have survived. Published three years after his untimely death, the best known collection of them is Letters to a Young Poet. The letters contain his meditations on life’s questions. 

The following year his Letters to a Young Woman was published. These letters are a collection of ones written to a young woman, Lisa Heise. Lisa was an admirer of the poet who wrote to him after her husband abandoned her and their two-year-old son. She told him that she found consolation in his Book of Images. 

In one letter, he wrote about tending one's inner garden - an occupation one can have in any season.

Tending my inner garden went splendidly this winter. Suddenly to be healed again and aware that the very ground of my being — my mind and spirit — was given time and space in which to go on growing; and there came from my heart a radiance I had not felt so strongly for a long time… You tell me how you are able to feel fully alive every moment of the day and that your inner life is brimming over; you write in the knowledge that what you have, if one looks at it squarely, outweighs and cancels all possible privations and losses that may later come along. It is precisely this that was borne in upon me more conclusively than ever before as I worked away during the long Winter months: that the stages by which life has become impoverished correspond with those earlier times when excesses of wealth were the accustomed measure. What, then, is there to fear? Only forgetting! But you and I, around us and in us, we have so much in store to help us remember!

Winter Words

It is fully winter in my part of the world, and we had a blizzard last weekend that is finally melting away. That makes me think of "Blizzard" by William Carlos Williams.

Snow:
years of anger following
hours that float idly down —
the blizzard
drifts its weight
deeper and deeper for three days
or sixty years, eh? Then
the sun! a clutter of
yellow and blue flakes —
Hairy looking trees stand out
in long alleys
over a wild solitude.
The man turns and there —
his solitary track stretched out
upon the world.

Williams says "three days or sixty years, eh?" and I wonder about the blizzards we endure.

In his poem, "Winter Trees," there is an optimism in the trees that have prepared for the inevitable and will wait out the cold.

All the complicated details
of the attiring and
the disattiring are completed!
A liquid moon
moves gently among
the long branches.
Thus having prepared their buds
against a sure winter
the wise trees
stand sleeping in the cold.


I did some searching online to find the Williams poems and came upon a page of winter words, including some poets and poems that I have not read for many years. If you're feeling the cold, make a nice cup of something hot to drink and read a few.


"The cold earth slept below"
by Percy Bysshe Shelley

The cold earth slept below;
Above the cold sky shone;
And all around,
With a chilling sound,
From caves of ice and fields of snow
The breath of night like death did flow
Beneath the sinking moon.

The wintry hedge was black;
The green grass was not seen;
The birds did rest
On the bare thorn’s breast,
Whose roots, beside the pathway track,
Had bound their folds o’er many a crack
Which the frost had made between...

    continue reading

White-Eyes
by Mary Oliver

In winter
    all the singing is in
         the tops of the trees
             where the wind-bird

with its white eyes
    shoves and pushes
         among the branches.
             Like any of us

he wants to go to sleep,
    but he's restless...  

continue reading

Stopping by Woods on a Solstice Evening

Robert Frost called "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" the poem that was his "best bid for remembrance" and it is one that almost every American student encounters.

I'm thinking about that poem on this solstice evening before Christmas which was part of its inspiration.

Robert Frost was a character and he built his own kind of image as a poet for the public. He had said that the poem came to him in one quick rush, but biographers have found drafts of the poem that show revisions. No matter. I am sure it was a poem that came to him in a rush. It has happened to me that way and no matter how much I play with the words and lines later, it will always feel like it came in one piece.

In Roads Not Taken: Rereading Robert Frost, a story is retold about a conversation Frost had with an audience member about the poem after a reading at Bowdoin College.

The poem had been around for 24 years and was a part of his reading repertoire. During the Q&A,  a young man named N. Arthur Bleau asked that standard and unanswerable question - Which poem is your favorite? Frost replied that he liked them all equally. But after the reading, Frost invited Bleau up to the stage and told him that really his favorite was "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." And, according to Bleau, he told him the poem's back story.

It was on a winter solstice when Frost and his wife knew they were poor enough that they probably wouldn't be able to buy Christmas presents for their children. Frost was a farmer, but not a very successful one. He took whatever produce he had and took it into town with horse and wagon to see if he could sell enough to buy some gifts.

He didn't sell anything. He didn't buy any presents. He headed home as evening came and it began to snow. Imagine that journey. He had failed as a farmer, but right then he had failed in some way as a father and as a provider.

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.

Perhaps, he was in his own head and not paying attention to the road. Maybe his horse sensed his mood or inattention because it stopped in the middle of a wood that wasn't near home. Frost told Bleau that he "bawled like a baby."

They were still. The snow continued to fill the woods. They were in woods owned by someone who lived in town and might have been a wealthy landowner. The horse shook and jingled its bells. A reminder of Christmas and a reminder to go on and get home to his family.

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

In the book, Roads Not Taken (page 127), Frost's daughter, Lesley, confirmed the story told at the reading. She said her father told her that "A man has as much right as a woman to a good cry now and again. The snow gave me shelter; the horse understood and gave me the time."

I encountered the poem a few times in school. I recall being told it was about responsibility, about taking time to see the beauty around us, about depression and suicide. There's some of all those in it. It's also about going home.

I took my big volume of his poems, The Collected Poems, Complete and Unabridged, off the shelf this morning. I may go for a walk in the little woods near my home today. I do that a lot anyway. And tonight, when the night is dark and deep, I think I will read some Frost poems about winter, snow and going home.

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There is also a very nice picture-book edition of "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening" illustrated by Susan Jeffers

Cross-posted from Weekends in Paradelle

December, Outdoors

John Updike's poetry is often overlooked in favor of his novels and short stories. It is often noted that his fiction is "poetic" and rich in its use of language. But the poems don't get much attention.

Updike wrote some witty, light verse and liked to play with words and language in his poetry. But he also wrote a good number of solid poems.

I like this one which was posted on the writersalmanac.publicradio.org site this month.

holding the dunes, originally uploaded by Ken Ronkowitz.

December, Outdoors

Clouds like fish shedding scales are stretched
thin above Salem. The calm cold sea
accepts the sun as an equal, a match:
the horizon a truce, the air all still.
Sun, but no shadows somehow, the trees
ideally deleafed, a contemplative gray
that ushers into the woods (in summer
crammed with undergrowth) sheer space.

How fortunate it is to move about
without impediment, Nature having
no case to make, no special weather to plead,
unlike some storm-obsessed old symphonist.
The day is piano; I see buds so subtle
they know, though fat, that this is no time to bloom.

by John Updike, from Endpoint and Other Poems

A Mind of Winter

Welcome to December! Do you have a mind of winter yet?


The Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

by Wallace Stevens

via https://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15745 



The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens

Some Extra Winter Prompting

If you want to write more in the new year, another source of poetry writing prompts is "The Music In It", poet Adele Kenny's blog on poetry and poets – the craft and the community. 

She posts a new writing prompt most weeks (usually on Saturdays) and there is an archive for past prompts.

Recently, she featured a winter prompt with a series of links to sample winter poems.

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15465  “A Winter Without Snow” by J. D. McClatchy

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/22693 “Approach of Winter” by Willian Carlos Williams

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/22694 “An Old Man’s Winter Night” by Robert Frost

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20526 “Winter Distances” by Fanny Howe

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/22050 “Winter Trees” by William Carlos Williams

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20938 “Return to Winter” by Elaine Terranova

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19217 “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden

Adele Kenny is the author of 23 books of poetry and non-fiction. Over 700 of her poems, articles, and reviews have been published in journals throughout North and South America, the UK, Europe, Australia, and Asia, as well as in anthologies.  She is currently poetry editor of Tiferet: A Journal of Spiritual Literature.

Poems For A Snow Day

I am home for another snow day from school. Whether you are the student or the professor, the thrill of being home from school because of snow has not waned. Unfortunately, the shoveling and the thoughts about making up the lost class time will come too - but for now, I go online and search for some snow poems to enjoy with my third cup of coffee.

The Academy of American Poets website offers plenty of searchable possibilities. There are the standards that you find in many anthologies - Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost, or The Snow Man by Wallace Stevens, for example.

Here are the opening lines from a few others -

Snow
by Naomi Shihab Nye

Once with my scarf knotted over my mouth
I lumbered into a storm of snow up the long hill
and did not know where I was going except to the top of it.
In those days we went out like that.
Even children went out like that.
Someone was crying hard at home again,
raging blizzard of sobs...

read more


Snow-Bound [The sun that brief December day]
by John Greenleaf Whittier

The sun that brief December day
Rose cheerless over hills of gray,
And, darkly circled, gave at noon
A sadder light than waning moon.
Slow tracing down the thickening sky
Its mute and ominous prophecy,
A portent seeming less than threat,
It sank from sight before it set...

read more


Why is the Color of Snow?
by Brenda Shaughnessy

Let's ask a poet with no way of knowing.
Someone who can give us an answer,
another duplicity to help double the world.

What kind of poetry is all question, anyway?
Each question leads to an iceburn,
a snownova, a single bed spinning in space.

Poet, Decide! I am lonely with questions.
What is snow? What isn't?
Do you see how it is for me...

read more


The Snowfall Is So Silent
by Miguel de Unamuno   Translated by Robert Bly

The snowfall is so silent,
so slow,
bit by bit, with delicacy
it settles down on the earth
and covers over the fields.
The silent snow comes down
white and weightless;
snowfall makes no noise,
falls as forgetting falls,
flake after flake...

read more


And, looking ahead a month...


Spring Snow
by Arthur Sze

A spring snow coincides with plum blossoms.
In a month, you will forget, then remember
when nine ravens perched in the elm sway in wind.

I will remember when I brake to a stop,
and a hubcap rolls through the intersection...

read more



And if the kids are home with you...
Snow, Snow: Winter Poems for Children
Just Say No To Yellow Snow!: A Collection Of Winter Poems For Children

Winter Haiku

Because Poets Online fell a bit behind last month, we are offering a second prompt this month.

Quite simply, write one or more winter, year-end haiku.

Traditionally, haiku (in English) have 3 lines: first line is 5 syllables, second line is 7 syllables and the third line is 5 syllables.

In Japanese, haiku also has three parts but can be written as one line. Instead of counting syllables, the Japanese count sounds.

Haiku is required to suggest a single season. It might be directly, by using a word like snow or ice for winter, or indirectly, by tone or imagery. In our English translations, many times the season word is actually used, but it would probably not appear in the original.

The deadline for haiku submissions is January 3.

3 haiku by Basho

The sea darkens.
The voices of the wild ducks
turn white.

Winter seclusion:
once again I lean
against this post.

Grasshopper— you
be the cemetery watcher
after I die.

Winter haiku by Issa

The older we get,
the more easily tears come
on a long day.

The winter sun-
on the horse's back
my frozen shadow.

Awake at night,
the lamp low,
the oil freezing.

First winter rain-
even the monkey
seems to want a raincoat.

When the winter chrysanthemums go,
there's nothing to write about
but radishes.

First snow
falling
on the half-finished bridge.

The winter storm
hid in the bamboo grove
and quieted away.