On a suitably frosty night, snow had not yet come to Knaresborough, except in our poems. William Carlos Williams’ ‘Hunters in the snow’ describes the Bruegel painting of that name in a very literal example of ekphrasis – and also, we learnt, a product of the Imagist movement. The same poet neatly anthropomorphises ‘Winter trees’. Andrew Young does the same for ‘Hard frost’ and Samuel Taylor Coleridge insists on its ‘secret ministry’ in ‘Frost at midnight’, which however is mainly about wishing a better childhood than his own for his baby son Hartley.
TS Eliot’s ‘The journey of the magi’ gives us the actuality and the mystery of the wise men’s experiences. Laurie Lee’s ‘Christmas landscape’ is also in the grip of a hard winter, and also imagines a hard birth.
‘The darkling thrush’, in Thomas Hardy’s poem, despite bitter cold cheers the poet with his singing.
Robert Frost ‘Stopping by woods on a snowy evening’ evokes the hush that accompanies a snowfall.
In Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘Mean time’, the darkness of winter compounds the difficulty of the poet’s failed relationship. Her ‘Room’ is an unremittingly bleak home, but ‘The house of winter’ in George Mackay Brown’s poem may be more welcoming than it first appears.
In ‘Snow’ Louis MacNeice relishes all the vivid sensations in his room on a winter evening. By contrast Charlotte Mew in ‘The call’ is compelled to leave her cosy room following a mysterious visit.
Robert Hayden in ‘Those winter Sundays’ realises at last – and probably too late – how his father expressed his love of family.
In William McGonagall’s ludicrous verses Mr Smiggs expresses his love for Mrs Smiggs by spending a crown on ‘The Christmas Goose’.
We heard several short poems from an early collection ‘Homing In’ by Andrew Rumsey, son-in-law of group members and currently Bishop of Ramsbury. These were ‘All Saints Day’, ‘Come in, we’re closed’, ‘From a curry house’ and ‘The library reunion’.
Alfred Lord Tennyson in section 106 of ‘In memoriam’ wants to ring in a better world with the New Year, a sentiment that remains perennially pertinent.
We concluded, as William Shakespeare concluded Love’s Labour’s Lost, with his wonderfully observed ‘Winter’.
Excellent review, as usual Chris !