![]() Written in 1960 and infused with Cold War and environmentalist elements, ‘Waking in Winter’ offers a bleak vision of a post-nuclear winter where the sky doesn’t just look like tin – the whole atmosphere tastes metallic, too. Although he’s better known for his much-misinterpreted poem ‘The Road Not Taken’, this is a gem of a winter poem from the aptly named Frost.Ī slightly different kind of ‘winter’, this: a nuclear winter. In this poem you can see why Robert Frost and Edward Thomas got on so well: ‘Desert Places’ shows how much of Frost’s influence Thomas absorbed. Listen to Alec Guinness reading Eliot’s poem here. Told as a dramatic monologue, the poem cleverly includes details that will later have significance in the life of Jesus Christ – the ‘pieces of silver’ Judas received for betraying Jesus, for instance – whose significance the speaker cannot recognise at the time. The poem is about the journey of the ‘Three Wise Men’ to visit the baby Jesus. Eliot wrote the poem – about the Magi’s journey to visit the infant Christ – at the request of his publisher, Faber and Faber, who wanted a poem to go inside a series of shilling greeting-cards. Unlike many of his poems, Eliot wrote ‘Journey of the Magi’ quickly. This 1927 poem was originally commissioned to be included in a Christmas card (or pamphlet). The poem might also, by extension, be said to be about innocence more generally, given that it fuses a number of common tropes associated with innocence: lambs, snow, the new-born. ‘First Sight’ describes lambs taking their first steps in the snow, meditating upon the fact that the animals can have no grasp of the world without snow, of the grass and flowers beneath the white wintry canopy that is awaiting them when spring comes. Unusually for Larkin, it is a rather upbeat poem, a beautiful lyric about the natural world. This short lyric from Britain’s best-loved lugubrious poet is about lambs taking their first steps in the snow, unaware of the ‘immeasurable surprise’ that nature has in store for them – such as the bright brilliance, sunshine, and flowering of spring. Worth reading for the astonishing language-use in the fourth line alone: ‘World is suddener than we fancy it.’ We select more great MacNeice poems here. This short poem from one of the Thirties poets takes an altogether more traditional subject: the snow falling outside. Of course, the Bard puts it better than that see the link above to read Shakespeare’s sonnet in full. Or, if they do sing, it’s such a sad song that it makes all the leaves on the trees pale, because they dread the approach of winter.’ ‘Yet all this abundance seemed to me to be like an fatherless child because you are free to enjoy summer with all its pleasures, while I – because away from you – have to dwell in winter, when no birds sing. ![]() It’s a bit like a lord’s widow, who fell pregnant with her husband’s child but who was made a widow before the child was born. ![]() ![]() ‘Yet when I was removed from you it was summer – or late summer, early autumn – with the fruitfulness of nature one associates with that time of year. I have felt cold, the days have appeared dark, and it feels like December everywhere I look, with everything bare and empty. Sonnet 97 might be paraphrased as follows: ‘When I was absent from you, although it was literally summer, it felt like winter, because I was apart from you. The poem goes on to bring in other seasons – notably autumn – but in the final line winter returns, so we’d say this qualifies as a great winter poem. This sonnet from William Shakespeare uses winter imagery to describe the speaker’s absence from his lover. ![]() What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen! ) Follow the link above to read the full poem and learn more about it.įrom thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year! (We also discuss Dickinson – and the fact that she was more famous in her lifetime as a gardener than as a poet – in our book of literary trivia, The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers’ Journey Through Curiosities of History. We’ve compiled some of Emily Dickinson’s greatest poems here. ‘It sifts from leaden sieves’ (like ‘It rains’, that common idiom where the precise meaning of ‘it’ is hard to define) captures the spectral beauty of snow much more effectively. Who but Dickinson would have thought to describe snow as ‘alabaster wool’? But the most remarkable thing about the poem is that it never mentions snow by name. A beautiful description of the way snow obscures familiar objects, rendering them strange and ghostly to us. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |