Winter/ the year's turning

Winter (beginning 21st December) is better than autumn.

Entrances uncovered
Street signs you never saw
All entrances delivered
Courtesy of winter.

Mark E. Smith practically murmurs the refrain of ‘Winter’, which is a quieter recording than usual for The Fall though the verse lyrics are typically caustic. A ‘mad kid’ in the streets resembles ‘the victim of a pogrom’; the lawn outside of the ‘alcoholics’ dry-out house’ is strewn with beer-cans. The song paints a bleak picture of Mancunian deprivation laid bare in winter; street signs seem unfamiliar in the absence of accompanying foliage or the generosity of sunlight. ‘All entrances delivered’ is rather elusive; perhaps it refers to laxity, how the winter cold drives people into their bad habits and their hovels, justifies their nihilism, and lessens their resolve. I certainly find it hard to motivate myself when the day seems to end at 4pm. Is there a worse month during which to give up alcohol than January?¹ Abstinence can wait till Lent.

Still, as bleak (meaning pale, not bad) as the winter sky can be, when the winter sunlight appears it seems more beautiful by far than it does in the summer: it is more angular, casting dramatic shadows and painting the world in high contrast, and provides greater relief. If we ignore the brutal verse of ‘Winter’, the chorus might be read as a tribute to this aspect of winter light. I’m fortunate enough to live in a city built of Cotswold stone, which never looks more honeyed than it does on a bright morning in winter. If the thing being laid bare is essentially good, then exposure does it a service.

I have always preferred winter (21st December - 21st March) to autumn because a) winter contains Christmas and b) it tends towards spring, the best season, while autumn tends towards the shortest day of the year. Autumn is full of dread and winter full of alcohol and lengthening days, which provide hope. Though there are more warm days in autumn than winter, I find that my experience of joy can be strongly mitigated by the awareness that it will soon run out, a feeling which is heightened in autumn as the days noticeably shrink and the trees shed their leaves. Many will disagree. I am informed by my American friends that fall is the best season and autumn in Britain is rubbish because our trees are less red.

Some poets agree with me, some don’t. Here is some poetry about winter.

From T. S. Eliot, 'Little Gidding'

Midwinter spring is its own season
Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown,
Suspended in time, between pole and tropic.
When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire,
The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches,
In windless cold that is the heart's heat,
Reflecting in a watery mirror
A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon.
And glow more intense than blaze of branch, or brazier,
Stirs the dumb spirit: no wind, but pentecostal fire
In the dark time of the year. Between melting and freezing
The soul's sap quivers. There is no earth smell
Or smell of living thing. This is the spring time
But not in time's covenant. Now the hedgerow
Is blanched for an hour with transitory blossom
Of snow, a bloom more sudden
Than that of summer, neither budding nor fading,
Not in the scheme of generation.
Where is the summer, the unimaginable Zero summer?

Unmistakeable. Eliot does justice to high contrast in winter, the surprise of sunlight, the shock of snow, the penetration of ‘windless cold’.

R. S. Thomas, 'Song at the Year's Turning'

Shelley dreamed it. Now the dream decays.
The props crumble; the familiar ways
Are stale with tears trodden underfoot.
The heart's flower withers at the root.
Bury it then, in history's sterile dust.
The slow years shall tame your tawny lust.

Love deceived him; what is there to say
The mind brought you by a better way
To this despair? Lost in the world's wood
You cannot stanch the bright menstrual blood.
The earth sickens; under naked boughs
The frost comes to barb your broken vows.

Is there blessing? Light's peculiar grace
In cold splendour robes this tortured place
For strange marriage. Voices in the wind
Weave a garland where a mortal sinned.
Winter rots you; who is there to blame?
The new grass shall purge you in its flame.

Thomas looks forward to spring in characteristically punishing eschatological terms. The metrical incompletion reflects his argument: lines of pentameter catalectic (9 syllables) are wanting, like the sick human subject in the dark, waiting for grace. 

Thomas Hardy, 'Neutral Tones'

We stood by a pond that winter day,
And the sun was white, as though chidden of God,
And a few leaves lay on the starving sod;
– They had fallen from an ash, and were gray.

Your eyes on me were as eyes that rove
Over tedious riddles of years ago;
And some words played between us to and fro
On which lost the more by our love.

The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing
Alive enough to have strength to die;
And a grin of bitterness swept thereby
Like an ominous bird a-wing….

Since then, keen lessons that love deceives,
And wrings with wrong, have shaped to me
Your face, and the God curst sun, and a tree,
And a pond edged with grayish leaves.

‘The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing/ alive enough to have strength to die’ might be the harshest thing uttered in a breakup. 

James Joyce, 'Tilly'

He travels after a winter sun,
Urging the cattle along a cold red road,
Calling to them, a voice they know,
He drives his beasts above Cabra.

The voice tells them home is warm.
They moo and make brute music with their hooves. 
He drives them with a flowering branch before him,
Smoke pluming their foreheads.

Boor, bond of the herd,
Tonight stretch full by the fire!
I bleed by the black stream
For my torn bough!

That final stanza, in which the tree speaks to the herder who drives his cattle with one of its branches, ranks among the greatest Imagist moments. Winter spurs the labourer home as the trees perish and their comrades burn in the hearth. Fans of Modernisn should read the Pomes Penyeach. 

The sun glances on New College, Oxford in January.

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1. Anyway, it’s Christmas until Candlemas, which falls on 2nd February. Keep up the festivities!