Frosty wind made moan

Six poets reflect on Christmas and winter poems glowing with mystery

Jean Sprackland

In Louis MacNeice’s “Snow” we are indoors looking out as snow suddenly begins to fall. On this side of the window is a bowl of roses, and the contradiction between the two startles us into a kind of intoxication, a rapturous state in which we realise we are truly alive. I love the way the poem gets to the numinous through the senses: not only the visual, but the sound of the fire and the taste of a tangerine. The experience is so intense, it transcends the physical. The mystery comes in the final line: “There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.” When I first read it, I thought of separation – the window a barrier keeping two incompatible things from touching. But the most obvious quality of glass is transparency, which is what allows us to perceive, for this fleeting moment, how plural the world really is.

Seán Hewitt

Published in 1915, when destruction, darkness and unimaginable death were ravaging Europe, “The Oxen” is Thomas Hardy at his least cynical. In just four rhymed stanzas, he gathers a sense of mystery and miracle. Recalling, first, a childhood memory of a Nativity story, Hardy acknowledges a disenchantment, not only of the sort that comes with age, but of the sort that comes with war. “So fair a fancy few would weave / In these years.” But all innocence is not lost; the power of story survives. I love the succession of dialect words, the speaker imagining joining someone and going into the night on Christmas Eve, to “the lonely barton by yonder coomb”, glowing with the longing that somewhere on a blighted planet the remnants of magic and miracle might still exist. It is a poem about the resilience of faith, the need for wonder. I follow it as I might a light in the darkness, “hoping it might be so”.

Niall Campbell

“One must have a mind of winter / to regard the frost,” states Wallace Stevens at the outset of his wonderful poem “The Snow Man”. The poem then places us into this world of winter – its frost, its magnificent ice. Stevens, bringing his poem to life, is not concerned just with trees, so much as with pines and spruces and junipers. He brings a realness and specificity to the world – but here is where his trick lies. Just at the point where his world is most established, established by all the care of his description, he pulls away from it. The visible world is not his only interest – not really – not even after building it up with all those previous lines. No, his concern is also the mystery, the beyond. He, instead, is “the listener, who listens in the snow, / And, nothing ­himself, beholds / Nothing that is not there and / The nothing that is”.

Fiona Sampson

“The Cherry Tree Carol” is the work not of one poet but of many. It appears in the fifteenth- century N-Town mysteries, but regional variants speak to a softening and loosening of collective memory. Set on the journey to Bethlehem, it’s wonderfully unpretentious from the very first line, “Joseph was an old man”. His young wife asks him to pick her some cherries. She’s pregnant, after all. Joseph refuses. “Let him pluck thee a cherry / That brought thee with child,” he grumbles. So Mary, or the child she’s carrying, commands the tree, which bows down and lets her eat. This apocryphal story represents the coming birth and Passion – a tree, cherries “as red as blood”, Annunciation – in the language of country things. Ella Leather and Ralph Vaughan Williams collected this carol from hop-pickers and travellers in Herefordshire’s orchard country, exactly where I live. The miraculous, the modest and the local. 

Robin Robertson

The supreme poet of winter is Nobel Prize- winner Tomas Tranströmer. His landscape is dark forests, restless seas and jagged Swedish coastland; storm, sudden light and silence. Endless snow. There is a profoundly spiritual element in his poetic vision, though not a ­conventionally religious one. Interested in polarities and how we respond to finding ourselves at pivotal points, he said, “My poems are meeting places”, and he was drawn, as all poets should be, to epiphanies: moments of sudden, spiritual manifestation when intimate connection is made. 

In “Face to Face” there is just such a moment. The first two quatrains describe how winter has imbedded itself: “In February life stood still. The birds refused to fly … the trees were turned away … footprints grew old out on the ice-crust … language was being broken down.” Then the third stanza shifts tenses, offering recovery – invoking, with its final verb, the hope of a new season: 

“Suddenly, something approaches the ­window.

I stop working and look up.

The colours blaze. Everything turns around.

The earth and I spring at each other.”

Alice Oswald

When I was in Empúries, visiting the temple of Asclepius, I heard someone sing a most beautiful ancient song – “The Song of the Sibyl” – an oral poem about the end of the world … “Great fire from Heaven will come down, seas fountains and rivers all will burn, fish will scream loudly and in horror, losing their natural delights …” This song has been sung in Mallorca every Christmas since medieval times, but nobody knows who composed it. Perhaps the Sibyl of Delphi taught it to the Sibyl of Cumae. Perhaps one woman sang it to another and it moved from mouth to mouth unwritten down for hundreds of years. The end of the world has been predicted since the beginning of the world. Like Christmas, it exists outside time and especially so for me, since I first heard it sung in Catalan, by moonlight, sitting in a ­temple dedicated to sleep.