In the bleak midwinter

Uncredited illustration of Old Man Winter, used for "Winter”
in Child Life: A Collection of Poems, edited by John Greenleaf Whittier

The winter solstice comes this week. It is an astronomical phenomenon that marks the shortest day and the longest night of the year. This is the December solstice in the Northern Hemisphere and the June solstice in the Southern Hemisphere.

The winter solstice is also known as the hiemal or hibernal solstice, Midwinter, Yule, the Longest Night and Jólo.

"Midwinter" seems odd to Americans since it often doesn't seem like winter until December in many parts of the country, so to have December 21 as a midpoint seems wrong. (I always felt the same about "midsummer" - as in Shakespeare's play.) The winter solstice can also be known as midwinter because the days get longer after the solstice, but it doesn't mean that it gets any warmer. In fact, for me in the northeast, the bleakest part of winter is January or February.

Christina Rossetti was a Pre-Raphaelite poet who published her most famous collection, Goblin Market and Other Poems in 1862 when she was 31 years old. "In the Bleak Midwinter" is probably her most famous poem. She first published it under the title "A Christmas Carol," and it does have a songlike quality.

The first stanza is the best-known:

In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter, long ago.

I think that people today might recognize her poem as a Christmas carol and it is a Nativity poem.

In the Greek myths, the goddess of the harvest, Demeter, had her daughter Persephone kidnapped by Hades, lord of the underworld. It so depressed her, that she became despondent that she could not care for the lands, and winter took over. After a deal was struck with Hades, Persephone was allowed to return to the Earth for six months of the year at which time the lands thrived, but every six months she would return to the underworld and the seasons would change again.

Though some people 

Maybe you should make a Viking toast for the solstice.

Here is the rest of Rosetti's poem.

Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him, nor earth sustain; 

Heaven and earth shall flee away when He comes to reign.

In the bleak midwinter a stable place sufficed

The Lord God Almighty, Jesus Christ.

Enough for Him, whom cherubim, worship night and day,

Breastful of milk, and a mangerful of hay;

Enough for Him, whom angels fall before,

The ox and ass and camel which adore.

Angels and archangels may have gathered there,

Cherubim and seraphim thronged the air;

But His mother only, in her maiden bliss,

Worshipped the beloved with a kiss.

What can I give Him, poor as I am?

If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb;

If I were a Wise Man, I would do my part;

Yet what I can I give Him: give my heart.

  

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The Approach of Winter

Approach of Winter
by William Carlos Williams

The half-stripped trees
struck by a wind together, 
bending all,
the leaves flutter drily
and refuse to let go
or driven like hail
stream bitterly out to one side
and fall
where the salvias, hard carmine,—
like no leaf that ever was—
edge the bare garden.


William Carlos Williams was born in Rutherford, New Jersey in 1883. A highly influential figure in twentieth-century poetry, he was the author of Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems and many other works. Williams was also a physician. He died in 1963.

Williams was known as an Imagist poet. “Imagism was born in England and America in the early twentieth century. A reactionary movement against romanticism and Victorian poetry, Imagism emphasized simplicity, clarity of expression, and precision through the use of exacting visual images.”    

Read more about the history of the Imagist movement.


  

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Prompt: Place

"Space" is location, physical space, and physical geography. But "place" is what gives a space meaning, a “personality” and a connection to a cultural or personal identity. It is the culturally ascribed meaning given to a space

I have participated in several workshops that focused on the poetry of place. Usually, we were writing about a particular place and focused on the details and sensory descriptions. The three components of place are location, locale, and a sense of place. In writing about a place this month, a sense of place is our primary concern. That is the emotions someone attaches to an area based on their experiences. 

For this call for submissions, I thought of Exit 13 poetry magazine which is a small publication focused on travel, geography and places where we live, work, and explore. 

This theme is one of the oldest in poetry. Homer’s Odyssey, Virgil’s poems about farms and farming, Dante’s Inferno, Wordsworth's poems of the English Lake District, T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, Elizabeth’s Bishop’s Nova Scotia, Robert Hass’s California, and the southern New Jersey poems of Stephen Dunn of some of the many examples of poets who brought place into their poetry. I found a poetry atlas online that puts poems on the map, literally. 

What makes this writing prompt different is that we want you to write about a place where what makes it that place is removed from it. It is a process of subtraction that can make us reexamine how the place is defined.

This month we are using a poem by Margaret R. Sáraco from her new collection If There Is No Wind. In fact, the book's title itself suggests that kind of subtraction. In her poem, "Autumnal Stroll," we know immediately that this space lacks what makes it a place.

the playground, austere
in darkness, out of
place without children,

A playground without children still has all of the equipment but is not a playground in the way that we connect to it emotionally.

A school without students is just a building. The process of the subtraction can be removing people or objects. Take all the plants from a greenhouse. Remove all the food from the kitchen. Enter a library without books. A bedroom without a bed.  

Does this mean that the place is empty and lonely? A beach in the off-season or covered with snow and without beachgoers can be ideal for some people. In Sáraco's poem, the empty playground is ultimately enjoyable. 

The time of day or the season can literally subtract people from places. In "February Evening in New York" by Denise Levertov, it is the usually busy city emptied. 

As the stores close, a winter light
    opens air to iris blue,
    glint of frost through the smoke
    grains of mica, salt of the sidewalk.

As the buildings close, released autonomous 
    feet pattern the streets
    in hurry and stroll; balloon heads
    drift and dive above them; the bodies   
    aren't really there.

Place can be applied at any scale - a small room or a landscape that stretches to the horizon.

Wallace Stevens’ “Anecdote of the Jar” creates a new place by placing an object to a space where it doesn't quite belong.

I placed a jar in Tennessee,

And round it was, upon a hill.

It made the slovenly wilderness

Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,

And sprawled around, no longer wild.

For our January issue, we ask for poems about places where what gives them an emotional sense has been removed. Though the place might become a space, it can also become a new place.

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