Here are a few of my favorite poems that I feel capture the dreary feeling of winter.
With this poem, Spellbound, Emily Bronte brings her readers into a single moment in time. From this moment, the readers are trapped with the speaker. The various interpretations as to what spell the speaker is under. But whatever the spell and for whatever reason, the speaker makes it clear that she is held captive by a spell that immobilizes her even though there seems to be an impending doom. The speaker knows that something dreadful is coming her way, and yet she is unable to move.
–Corfman, Allisa. “Spellbound by Emily Bronte”. Poem Analysis, Accessed 17 November 2022.
“Spellbound” Emily Bronte
The night is darkening round me,
The wild winds coldly blow;
But a tyrant spell has bound me,
And I cannot, cannot go.
The giant trees are bending
Their bare boughs weighed with snow;
The storm is fast descending,
And yet I cannot go.
Clouds beyond clouds above me,
Wastes beyond wastes below;
But nothing drear can move me;
I will not, cannot go.
Walking In Winter (Sylvia Plath)
I can taste the tin of the sky —- the real tin thing.
Winter dawn is the color of metal,
The trees stiffen into place like burnt nerves.
All night I have dreamed of destruction, annihilations —-
An assembly-line of cut throats, and you and I
Inching off in the gray Chevrolet, drinking the green
Poison of stilled lawns, the little clapboard gravestones,
Noiseless, on rubber wheels, on the way to the sea resort.
How the balconies echoed! How the sun lit up
The skulls, the unbuckled bones facing the view!
Space! Space! The bed linen was giving out entirely.
Cot legs melted in terrible attitudes, and the nurses —-
Each nurse patched her soul to a wound and disappeared.
The deathly guests had not been satisfied
With the rooms, or the smiles, or the beautiful rubber plants,
Or the sea, Hushing their peeled sense like Old Mother Morphia
“A slightly different kind of ‘winter’, this: a nuclear winter. 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. ‘Waking in Winter’ examines the bleakness of a winter created by man rather than nature – of ‘destructions, annihilations’.”
Dr Oliver Tearle – interestingliterature.com
I hope you enjoyed these poems, I will be adding more as I go but I wanted to leave these here in the meantime. Leave a comment of your thoughts below. If you’re reading poetry and dreading the cold winter weather to come, consider reading this post I’ve written about three wonderful herbal tea recipes to keep you cozy.
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