Poetry of winter

I listened to a Poetry Foundation podcast about how various poets handled the symbolism of winter. First was Longfellow (a resident of Portland, Maine like the author of the piece, Annie Finch. Tour his house.) Here Longfellow uses himself to better understand nature.

Snow-flakes

By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 1807–1882

Out of the bosom of the Air,

Out of the cloud-folds of her garments shaken,

Over the woodlands brown and bare,

Over the harvest-fields forsaken,

Silent, and soft, and slow

Descends the snow.

Even as our cloudy fancies take

Suddenly shape in some divine expression,

Even as the troubled heart doth make

In the white countenance confession,

The troubled sky reveals

The grief it feels.

This is the poem of the air,

Slowly in silent syllables recorded;

This is the secret of despair,

Long in its cloudy bosom hoarded,

Now whispered and revealed

To wood and field.

Finch's next choice was Edna St. Vincent Millay. I'm always kind of interested when she comes up because I remember reading at least one literary source that made fun of people who liked her poetry and lumped her in with Rod McKuen-harsh.

Finch brought that up after the poem, that she's popular but unfairly considered, in her eyes, something of a guilty pleasure. According to her biography, Ann Sexton even once admitted sheepishly to Sylvia Plath that she liked Millay (although she also referred to her as old fashioned at one point.) In contrast with the Longfellow, here Millay is using winter to understand herself better, specifically coming to terms with aging:

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why (Sonnet XLIII)

by Edna St. Vincent Millay

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,

I have forgotten, and what arms have lain

Under my head till morning; but the rain

Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh

Upon the glass and listen for reply,

And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain

For unremembered lads that not again

Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.

Thus in winter stands the lonely tree,

Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,

Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:

I cannot say what loves have come and gone,

I only know that summer sang in me

A little while, that in me sings no more.

This was followed by a Wallace Stevens piece which is interesting for not taking the viewpoint of someone struggling with winter:

The Snow Man

By Wallace Stevens 1879–1955

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.

Since I've mentioned the author, I might as well include her poem which they concluded the podcast with, "Winter Solstice Chant":

Vines, leaves, roots of darkness, growing,

now you are uncurled and cover our eyes

with the edge of winter sky

leaning over us in icy stars.

Vines, leaves, roots of darkness, growing,

come with your seasons, your fullness, your end.