`Ah, Bitter Chill It Was!'

My boss and her husband spend weekends and holidays on their farm, about 90 minutes northwest of Houston, where they raise cows, bulls, pecans and snakes. Their house in the city is a convenience, more a motel than a homestead. Their heart is in the country. She wrote me Sunday evening about a late-night walk in the Texas winter:

“The frost was starting to set and it was still and clear. The moon was very bright, so there weren't many stars to be seen. Nature compensated, though, because the moonlight was reflected in the frost. It was magical. I walked for several minutes, breathing in the cold air (cold for me!), then turned in feeling lucky to have experienced this. Then this morning I took the dogs out around 8. The frost was a heavy one and the ground was almost as white as snow. Again, there was the twinkling of the sunlight on the frost. There's a different quality to sound, too, when everything's covered with a thick coat of frost.”

Winter stirs the poetic impulse. I cherish northern memories of late-night walks in deep winter, when the ground is stone and each step is a crunch and a crack, and the wind is a muted roar. Ann adds:

“I felt so inadequate trying to put words to the effect in both the light and the dark and I thought to myself, some poet has seen this and written something that's worthy of it.”

First I thought of Coleridge and his “secret ministry of frost” in “Frost at Midnight.” Then of Keats’ “The Eve of St. Agnes.” By happy happenstance, Sunday, Jan. 20, was St. Agnes’ Eve.:

“St. Agnes’ Eve – Ah, bitter chill it was!
The owl, for all his feather, was a-cold;
The hare limp’d trembling through the frozen grass,
And silent was the flock in woolly fold….”

We might consider Thoreau the poet of winter if he hadn’t also documented the other seasons with comparable precision. Here’s a journal entry from Jan. 11, 1884:

“The north side of all stubble, weeds, and trees, and the whole forest is covered with a hoar frost a quarter to a half inch deep. It is easily shaken off. The air is still full of mist. No snow has fallen, but, as it were, the vapor has been caught by the trees like a cobweb. The trees are bright hoary forms, the ghosts of trees. In fact, the warm breath of the earth is frozen on its beard.”

And this, from Jan. 8, 1852:

“I notice that almost every track which I made yesterday in the snow—perhaps ten inches deep—has got a dead leaf in it, though none is to be seen on the snow around.”

And I think of a phrase from John Shade’s poem “Pale Fire” in Nabokov’s Pale Fire: “the svelte/Stilettos of a frozen stillicide.” And of a late, lovely poem by Richard Wilbur, “Year’s End,” which begins:

“Now winter downs the dying of the year,
And night is all a settlement of snow;
From the soft street the rooms of houses show
A gathered light, a shapen atmosphere,
Like frozen-over lakes whose ice is thin
And still allows some stirring down within.”

Come to think of it, Ann didn’t need any help. This is awfully good:

“The moon was very bright, so there weren't many stars to be seen. Nature compensated, though, because the moonlight was reflected in the frost.”