Winter’s Chill: Poetic Reflections on Cold, Snow, and Survival by Wilbur, Mansfield, Shakespeare, and More

January 28, 2020

On this particularly bitter day in Maple Grove, Minnesota, where the temperature hovers around a crisp 2 degrees, winter’s coldness is sharply felt—not just in the bones but in the heart as well.

The poetry of winter’s chill captures this stark reality with evocative beauty and somber reflection.

Richard Wilbur’s Orchard Trees - January paints a vivid picture of enduring affliction beneath the frozen exterior of trees.

Despite the icy assault, the trees hold firm, bearing the winter’s hardship with a quiet and unyielding strength:

The birds are gone,
The ground is white,
The winds are wild,
They chill and bite;
The ground is thick with slush and sleet,
And I barely feel my feet.

It's not the case, though some might wish it so
Who from a window watch the blizzard blow
White riot through their branches vague and stark,
That they keep snug beneath their pelted bark.
They take affliction in until it jells
To crystal ice between their frozen cells ...

Wilbur reminds us that beneath the seeming desolation of winter lies a tenacious life that endures even frozen trials.

Katherine Mansfield’s poignant Winter Song tells a tale of hardship faced by the cold’s smallest victims—beggar children and robins battling the cruel elements without warmth or shelter.

Her repetition of “Snow and sleet, and sleet and snow” echoes the relentless nature of winter and the fierce struggle for survival:

Snow and sleet, and sleet and snow.
Will the Winter never go?

What do beggar children do
With no fire to cuddle to,
Perhaps with nowhere warm to go?

Snow and sleet, and sleet and snow.
Hail and ice, and ice and hail,
Water frozen in the pail.

See the robins, brown and red,
They are waiting to be fed.

Poor dears, battling in the gale!
Hail and ice, and ice and hail.

Her words serve a reminder to tend not only the garden but also the creatures and souls who weather the harsh season with less shelter.

Shakespeare’s winter wind is famously less unkind than human ingratitude, a stark contrast offering a bitter reflection on human nature:

Blow, blow, thou winter wind, thou art not so unkind
as man's ingratitude.

Edward Thomas captures winter’s intensity as if it has consumed all prior seasons in one powerful draught, its cheek flushed with the memory of spring and summer now past:

The Winter’s cheek flushed as if he had drained
Spring, Summer, and Autumn at a draught...

Finally, Helen Bayley Davis’s Jack Frost evokes the transient beauty of winter’s artistry, painting delicate frost flowers and butterflies on the windowpane—magical but fleeting, disappearing with the morning sun:

Someone painted pictures on my
Windowpane last night --
Willow trees with trailing boughs
And flowers, frosty white,
And lovely crystal butterflies;
But when the morning sun
Touched them with its golden beams,
They vanished one by one.

Winter’s cold indeed bites and blusters, but within its frozen grasp are enduring strength, quiet battles for life, and fragile moments of exquisite beauty that remind us of the season’s fleeting enchantment—and the promise of thaw to come.