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"One must have a mind of winter," Wallace Stevens says, to regard the season's bleak landscape "and not to think/Of any misery in the sound of the wind,/In the sound of a few leaves…." Stevens' famous poem, in evoking the barest and most minimal elements of the winter scene, enjoins the reader to look carefully, "[a]nd, nothing himself, beholds/Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is." Perhaps the very barrenness of winter aids clearer seeing.
I am not a fan of winter, having grown up in Texas and Oklahoma where the winters of my childhood were often mild and even when very cold, were short. Nevertheless I admit that winter has its own kind of beauty and perhaps allows one to be more contemplative in and of one's surroundings.
William Carlos William was certainly seeing clearly when he wrote one of my favorite winter poems, "Winter Trees":
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 too have often gazed at the skeletal trees of winter and been captivated by their austere beauty as the bare limbs seem to grasp at the sky. The sky itself in my adopted home, the Washington, D.C. area, has a special blue color on clear days that I have never seen elsewhere:
Gifts From the Cold
(for Naomi)
Bitter cold
but the sky
is that perfect
Washington winter blue.
The wind slashes across
my upturned face but
I drink in the view
like cold water.
I am rooted
to the pavement
between the lanes
the way I stood
transfixed last night
when you stood
in my doorway.
Another favorite that describes a winter landscape yet also suggests larger implications is Anthony Hecht's "Crows in Winter," which begins
Here's a meeting
of morticians in our trees.
They agree in klaxon voices:
things are looking good.
The snowfields signify a landscape of clean skulls….
The poet continues to observe and, more importantly, listen to the crows:
The first cosmetic pinks
of dawn amuse them greatly.
They foresee the expansion of graveyards,
they talk real estate.
Cras, they say,
repeating a rumor
among the whitened branches.
Finally these musings lead to a darker conclusion, fulfilling the foreshadowing implied by the crows' conversations
And the wind, a voiceless thorn,
goes over the details,
making a soft promise
to take our breath away.
I, too, sometimes have a mind of winter:
Mind of Winter
Regard the purity
of fresh snowfall
under the icy moon
before sunlight washes
over and it crusts
and darkens to the color
of ash or soot.
The cold dry wind
sweeps over it
and whispers
forget forget forget
to hold nothing
in the mind
is everything.
Finally, my very favorite winter verse, a poem by Thomas Hardy that describes the bleakness of winter, yet concludes with a tiny possibility of redemption:
I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-grey,
And Winter's dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.
The land's sharp features seemed to be
The Century's corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.
At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.
So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.
Dear Reader, I hope the New Year brings hope and happiness to you.
Notes
Wallace Stevens, "The Snow Man"
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45235/the-snow-man-56d224a6d4e90
Anthony Hecht, "Crows in Winter"
https://uudbq.org/wp/?event=weekly-poetry-crows-in-winter
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