Winter Poetry
English 12/ Miss Harris
Name:___________________________
Blow, Blow, Thou Winter Wind
Act II, Scene 7 from As You Like It by William Shakespeare (1600)
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.
Heigh-ho! sing, heigh-ho! unto the green holly:
Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly:
Then, heigh-ho, the holly!
This life is most jolly.
Freeze, freeze, thou bitter sky,
That dost not bite so nigh
As benefits forgot:
Though thou the waters warp,
Thy sting is not so sharp
As friend remember’d not.
Heigh-ho! sing, &c.
Sonnet 97
by William Shakespeare (1609)
How like a winter hath my absence been
From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!
What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen!
What old December’s bareness every where!
And yet this time removed was summer’s time,
The teeming autumn, big with rich increase,
Bearing the wanton burden of the prime,
Like widow’d wombs after their lords’ decease:
Yet this abundant issue seem’d to me
But hope of orphans and unfather’d fruit;
For summer and his pleasures wait on thee,
And, thou away, the very birds are mute;
Or, if they sing, ’tis with so dull a cheer
That leaves look pale, dreading the winter’s near.
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Winter Poetry
English 12/ Miss Harris
Name:___________________________
Now Winter Nights Enlarge
Thomas Campion (1617)
Now winter nights enlarge
The number of their hours,
And clouds their storms discharge
Upon the airy towers.
Let now the chimneys blaze,
And cups o’erflow with wine;
Let well-tuned words amaze
With harmony divine.
Now yellow waxen lights
Shall wait on honey love,
While youthful revels, masques, and courtly sights
Sleep’s leaden spells remove.
This time doth well dispense
With lovers’ long discourse;
Much speech hath some defence,
Though beauty no remorse.
All do not all things well;
Some measures comely tread,
Some knotted riddles tell,
Some poems smoothly read.
The summer hath his joys
And winter his delights;
Though love and all his pleasures are but toys,
They shorten tedious nights.
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Winter Poetry
English 12/ Miss Harris
Name:___________________________
To Winter
William Blake (from Poetical Sketches, 1783)
O winter! bar thine adamantine doors:
The north is thine; there hast thou built thy dark
Deep-founded habitation. Shake not thy roofs
Nor bend thy pillars with thine iron car.
He hears me not, but o’er the yawning deep
Rides heavy; his storms are unchain’d, sheathed
In ribbed steel; I dare not lift mine eyes;
For he hath rear’d his sceptre o’er the world.
Lo! now the direful monster, whose skin clings
To his strong bones, strides o’er the groaning rocks:
He withers all in silence, and in his hand
Unclothes the earth, and freezes up frail life.
He takes his seat upon the cliffs, the mariner
Cries in vain. Poor little wretch! that deal’st
With storms, till heaven smiles, and the monster
Is driven yelling to his caves beneath Mount Hecla.
In drear-nighted December
John Keats (1829)
In drear-nighted December,
Too happy, happy tree,
Thy branches ne’er remember
Their green felicity:
The north cannot undo them
With a sleety whistle through them;
Nor frozen thawings glue them
From budding at the prime.
Ah! would ’twere so with many
A gentle girl and boy!
But were there ever any
Writhed not at passed joy?
The feel of not to feel it,
When there is none to heal it
Nor numbed sense to steel it,
Was never said in rhyme.
In drear-nighted December,
Too happy, happy brook,
Thy bubblings ne’er remember
Apollo’s summer look;
But with a sweet forgetting,
They stay their crystal fretting,
Never, never petting
About the frozen time.
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Winter Poetry
English 12/ Miss Harris
Name:___________________________
Winter Stores
Charlotte Brontë (published under her nom de plume, Currer Bell, 1846)
We take from life one little share,
And say that this shall be
A space, redeemed from toil and care,
From tears and sadness free.
And has the soul, then, only gained,
From this brief time of ease,
A moment’s rest, when overstrained,
One hurried glimpse of peace?
And, haply, Death unstrings his bow,
And Sorrow stands apart,
And, for a little while, we know
The sunshine of the heart.
No; while the sun shone kindly o’er us,
And flowers bloomed round our feet,—
While many a bud of joy before us
Unclosed its petals sweet,—
Existence seems a summer eve,
Warm, soft, and full of peace,
Our free, unfettered feelings give
The soul its full release.
An unseen work within was plying;
Like honey-seeking bee,
From flower to flower, unwearied, flying,
Laboured one faculty,—
A moment, then, it takes the power
To call up thoughts that throw
Around that charmed and hallowed hour,
This life’s divinest glow.
Thoughtful for Winter’s future sorrow,
Its gloom and scarcity;
Prescient to-day, of want to-morrow,
Toiled quiet Memory.
But Time, though viewlessly it flies,
And slowly, will not stay;
Alike, through clear and clouded skies,
It cleaves its silent way.
’Tis she that from each transient pleasure
Extracts a lasting good;
’Tis she that finds, in summer, treasure
To serve for winter’s food.
Alike the bitter cup of grief,
Alike the draught of bliss,
Its progress leaves but moment brief
For baffled lips to kiss
And when Youth’s summer day is
vanished,
And Age brings Winter’s stress,
Her stores, with hoarded sweets
replenished,
Life’s evening hours will bless.
The sparkling draught is dried away,
The hour of rest is gone,
And urgent voices, round us, say,
“'Ho, lingerer, hasten on!”
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Winter Poetry
English 12/ Miss Harris
Name:___________________________
To a Locomotive in Winter
from Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman (first published in 1881-82 edition)
Thee for my recitative,
Thee in the driving storm even as now, the snow, the winter-day declining,
Thee in thy panoply, thy measur’d dual throbbing and thy beat convulsive,
Thy black cylindric body, golden brass and silvery steel,
Thy ponderous side-bars, parallel and connecting rods, gyrating, shuttling at thy sides,
Thy metrical, now swelling pant and roar, now tapering in the distance,
Thy great protruding head-light fix’d in front,
Thy long, pale, floating vapor-pennants, tinged with delicate purple,
The dense and murky clouds out-belching from thy smoke-stack,
Thy knitted frame, thy springs and valves, the tremulous twinkle of thy wheels,
Thy train of cars behind, obedient, merrily following,
Through gale or calm, now swift, now slack, yet steadily careering;
Type of the modern—emblem of motion and power—pulse of the continent,
For once come serve the Muse and merge in verse, even as here I see thee,
With storm and buffeting gusts of wind and falling snow,
By day thy warning ringing bell to sound its notes,
By night thy silent signal lamps to swing.
Fierce-throated beauty!
Roll through my chant with all thy lawless music, thy swinging lamps at night,
Thy madly-whistled laughter, echoing, rumbling like an earthquake, rousing all,
Law of thyself complete, thine own track firmly holding,
(No sweetness debonair of tearful harp or glib piano thine,)
Thy trills of shrieks by rocks and hills return’d,
Launch’d o’er the prairies wide, across the lakes,
To the free skies unpent and glad and strong.
An Old Man’s Winter Night
Robert Frost (from Mountain Interval, 1920)
All out of doors looked darkly in at him
Through the thin frost, almost in separate stars,
That gathers on the pane in empty rooms.
What kept his eyes from giving back the gaze
Was the lamp tilted near them in his hand.
What kept him from remembering what it was
That brought him to that creaking room was age.
He stood with barrels round him—at a loss.
And having scared the cellar under him
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Winter Poetry
English 12/ Miss Harris
Name:___________________________
In clomping there, he scared it once again
In clomping off;—and scared the outer night,
Which has its sounds, familiar, like the roar
Of trees and crack of branches, common things,
But nothing so like beating on a box.
A light he was to no one but himself
Where now he sat, concerned with he knew what,
A quiet light, and then not even that.
He consigned to the moon, such as she was,
So late-arising, to the broken moon
As better than the sun in any case
For such a charge, his snow upon the roof,
His icicles along the wall to keep;
And slept. The log that shifted with a jolt
Once in the stove, disturbed him and he shifted,
And eased his heavy breathing, but still slept.
One aged man—one man—can’t fill a house,
A farm, a countryside, or if he can,
It’s thus he does it of a winter night.
The Snowman
Wallace Stevens (1921)
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.
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Winter Poetry
English 12/ Miss Harris
Name:___________________________
Dust of Snow
Robert Frost (1923)
The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree
Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
Robert Frost (1923)
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.
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Winter Poetry
English 12/ Miss Harris
Name:___________________________
Flightless Bird
by Jim Finnegan
February, Sunday morning,
retrieving the newpaper without putting in one’s contacts
(based on real event)
In that instant
when you hit a patch
of black ice &
the legs go up
in the air, observe
the feet seldom
above the height
of the head, the arms
flailing haplessly,
but there are no
handholds in space
for you, one so
cavalier with
gravity, what were
you thinking, o
flightless bird?—thud.
Untitled winter poem
by Dorothea Grossman
This winter feels colder than ever,
or maybe I'm just more sensitive
these days,
when the wind is
a fire engine
and the moon is sinister
and blue.
I’m all bundled up for it,
stamping my feet,
drinking rum,
counting the days
until the yellow flowers.
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Winter Poetry
English 12/ Miss Harris
Name:___________________________
Land of Long Shadows
by Ruth Hill
Lingering, lengthening, lavender shadows
softly sadden the snow.
Rowdy clouds and swirling flurries:
shadows slide ’cross slithering drifts.
The sun crawls around the low horizon,
drip-torching flames.
Inuit stalk Inukshuk statues,
their black and white parkas
eclipsing the horizon flares.
A tiny silhouetted sapling,
whipping in the winter wind,
makes a mile-long shadow,
across the creek, over the clearing,
and far into the woods.
In the shadow of faraway mountains,
slate blue flares pink, then fades.
Deep trails flood and fill
with violet blue.
Sunny valley bottoms
are squeezed up into the starry sky,
until all the shadows touch,
and the world is still.
Cold Winter Morn in Florida
by Joseph Pacheco
where wisps of vapor
from our mouths recall
northern winter breath
thicker than cigarette smoke,
that reminds us:
For blood grown thin
forty Fahrenheit is Siberia —
breezes suddenly blue
and brittle
shiver through citrus leaves —
Death owns a time share here
and watches,
dressed in warm-ups,
from his lanai.
a birdsong
bleak and offkey
chills our sense —
sunlight, pale and tentative,
shelters us from shade
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Winter Poetry
English 12/ Miss Harris
Name:___________________________
The Migrant
by Jack Peachum
Hobo Autumn hoists his bindle,
hitchhikes out to another year, a warmer clime,
hoping to catch up with Spring—
then Winter arrives, demanding entrance,
banging at the door with cold fists as if he lives here,
doffing his hat to show where he keeps long nights—
when he opens his suitcase in the dank hallway,
darkness spills onto the floor,
a few icy stars roll across the rug—
he hands out freezing rain as if it were candy,
and from his frozen pockets he draws forth
a penny-whistle for the children,
upon which he blows a chill wind.
We give the old miser the extra room,
the one with the leaky window
where the draft comes in,
counting the days until he moves on.
Blizzard
by Barbara Reiher-Meyers
Gale warning
hail warning
Sky sifts
high drifts
Finding bright blinding white
Snowball
snowfall
Moonscape
snowscape
Frostbite dost bite
Rococo swirls
hot cocoa curls
Icy glove
spicy love
Huddle in
cuddle in
Rock salt
clocks halt
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Winter Poetry
English 12/ Miss Harris
Name:___________________________
Sweet and Bitter
by Barbara Reiher-Meyers
Leaden lake, silent and dark;
coaxed to ripple under Winter’s touch.
I watch as a fragile feather
bobs
along
lakeshore.
Crows rummage through
remnants
of snow
on February’s lawn.
A dead leaf, imprisoned in chain link fence imitates
the flutter
of a bird.
Shortcut Through the Storm
by Robert Savino
There were too few roads.
There were too many motorists.
My choice was longer in distance,
but far less travelled.
I took a shortcut through the storm,
crawling over the black-iced asphalt,
too close behind Boyd’s black flower car,
in the dreary pitch of Ocean Parkway.
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Winter Poetry
English 12/ Miss Harris
Name:___________________________
Storm clouds shifting and changing,
pass over, so low, engulf my presence.
I exit in an angel’s breath,
a winged spirit of the Great South Bay,
greeted by Moses at the foot of the bridge,
moments from home and the neon lights
of strip mall shops, that brighten the bus
stop at the corner of Oak Neck Road.
Minutes pass slowly within these hours.
Sounds of snow plows wake me from sleep.
Underground Xmas
by Jackie Sheeler
Out of the packed train comes a horizontal tree, pine
needles poking through tight
plastic wrap. She’s wearing
a raincoat and a frown, the blue spruce
hugged in her strong arms like a Roman battering ram.
Commuters step aside, all sighs and clucks.
This woman loves someone enough
to bring them Christmas on the subway, wrestle
a tree twice her height through tonguesucking rush-hour crowds.
The sharp holiday
scent of pine enlivens the last car of the C train,
trails her to the 50th Street escalator,
where she juggles the pungent
tree on her hip, ascending.
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Winter Poetry
English 12/ Miss Harris
Name:___________________________
Reaching for White
by Lisa Shields
The sun rose on fields
snow blown and misted
ghostly swirls and dervishes.
No fog this–––
for fog simply lies.
No–––this was living
as it arched and twisted,
fingering out to the road
and reaching for me
like the shade of a beloved friend.
There was white inside,
trying to seep out of pores,
I felt it strain
trying to mesh and meld
with this sentient wraith
fingers touching
joining
and suddenly
I am the morning mist
dancing in the crystal air.
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Winter Poetry
English 12/ Miss Harris
Name:___________________________
Climate Change
by Lisa Shields
I was prepared for “different,”
packed blankets, sweaters
and clothing meant for “warm.”
I was ready for cooler climes,
snow, frost, even the chill of alone.
I fled on a rain washed day,
some would have said
did not bode well for fresh beginnings,
but I put a past in my rear view mirror,
drove through places I had known,
to points due North.
Now nights carry wood smoke,
the scent of cedar, the breath of pine,
the sky is brilliant clear
and the night stars do jazz hands
across my dazzled eyes.
They say I may be lonely,
having left so much behind me,
they warn that true winter
may ache me to the bone,
but three months of
no battles,
90 days without harsh,
12 weeks of “deeply calm”
and I am ready for any damned thing
the Snow Queen can throw my way.
Bring it on,
you never knew the cold
I knew before I flew.
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