Our winter library

A selection of poems that we think are perfect to read in winter

A Bird-Scene at a Rural Dwelling

When the inmate stirs, the birds retire discreetly
From the window-ledge, whereon they whistled sweetly
And on the step of the door,
In the misty morning hoar;
But now the dweller is up they flee
To the crooked neighbouring codlin-tree;
And when he comes fully forth they seek the garden,
And call from the lofty costard, as pleading pardon
For shouting so near before
In their joy at being alive:--
Meanwhile the hammering clock within goes five.

I know a domicile of brown and green,
Where for a hundred summers there have been
Just such enactments, just such daybreaks seen.

Thomas Hardy ( 1840-1928)

A Light Snow-Fall after Frost

On the flat road a man at last appears:
How much his whitening hairs
Owe to the settling snow's mute anchorage,
And how much to a life's rough pilgrimage,
One cannot certify.

The frost is on the wane,
And cobwebs hanging close outside the pane
Pose as festoons of thick white worsted there,
Of their pale presence no eye being aware
Till the rime made them plain.
​
A second man comes by;
His ruddy beard brings fire to the pallid scene:
His coat is faded green;
Hence seems it that his mien
Wears something of the dye
Of the berried holm-trees that he passes nigh.

The snow-feathers so gently swoop that though
But half an hour ago
The road was brown, and now is starkly white,
A watcher would have failed defining quite
When it transformed it so.
​
Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)

As the Tide Comes in

​The quivering terns dart wild and dive,
As the tide comes tumbling in.
The calm rock-pools grow all alive,
With the tide tumbling in.
The crab who under the brown weed creeps,

And the snail who lies in his house and sleeps,
Awake and stir, as the plunging sweeps
Of the tide come tumbling in.
Grey driftwood swishes along the sand,
As the tide tumbles in,
With wreck and wrack from many a land,
On the tide, tumbling in.
About the beach are a broken spar, A pale anemone's torn sea-star
And scattered scum of the waves' old war,
As the tide comes tumbling in.

And, oh, there is a stir at the heart of me,
As the tide comes tumbling in,
All life once more is a part of me,
As the tide tumbles in.
New hopes awaken beneath despair
And thoughts slip free of the sloth of care
While beauty and love are everywhere --
​As the tide comes tumbling in.

Cale Young Rice (1872-1943)

A Winter Hedgerow

The wintry wolds are white; the wind
Seems frozen; in the shelter'd nooks
The sparrows shiver; the black rooks
Wheel homeward where the elms behind
The manor stand; at the field's edge
The redbreasts in the blackthorn hedge

Sit close and under snowy eaves
The shrewmice sleep 'mid nested leaves.
​
William Sharp (1855–1905)

Harvest
 
Cows in the stall and sheep in the fold;
Clouds in the west, deep crimson and gold;
     A heron’s far flight to a roost somewhere;
     The twitter of killdees keen in the air;
The noise of a wagon that jolts through the gloam
     On the last load home.
 
There are lights in the windows; a blue spire of smoke
Climbs from the grange grove of elm and oak.
     The smell of the Earth, where the night pours to her
     Its dewy libation, is sweeter than myrrh,
And an incense to Toil is the smell of the loam
     On the last load home.
 
John Charles McNeill (1874-1907)

Hearth

Conjured from matches and twists of paper,
the log-fire burns – a friend for a stranger,
warmth for damp days. Flames lean in and then turn,
swaying and waving, their heads raised in praise
of the moment. The heart sings in return:
ther is a sense of home, a place to laze,
enjoy the glow, somewhere to lose concerns
as movement and colour absorb your gaze.

Embers shift and stir, silhouettes form
of tigers, forests, castles, a box of jewels;
while in the flames themselves, a swirling storm
of plasma churns, as atoms and molecules
break and whirl. Light shines in this world of ours –
a hearth can hold the substance of the stars.

Isobel Montgomery Campbell (1956-)

In an Old Barn

Tons upon tons the brown-green fragrant hay
O'erbrims the mows beyond the time-warped eaves,
Up to the rafters where the spider weaves,
Though few flies wander his secluded way.
Through a high chink one lonely golden ray,
Wherein the dust is dancing, slants unstirred.
In the dry hush some rustlings light are heard,
Of winter-hidden mice at furtive play.
Far down, the cattle in their shadowed stalls,
Nose-deep in clover fodder's meadowy scent,
Forget the snows that whelm their pasture streams,
The frost that bites the world beyond their walls.
Warm housed, they dream of summer, well content
In day-long contemplation of their dreams.

Sir Charles G D Roberts (1860-1943)

January Dusk
 
Austere and clad in sombre robes of grey,
    With hands upfolded and with silent wings,
In unimpassioned mystery the day
Passes; a lonely thrush its requiem sings.
 
The dust of night is tangled in the boughs
    Of leafless lime and lilac, and the pine
Grows blacker, and the star upon the brows
    Of sleep is set in heaven for a sign.
 
Earth’s little weary peoples fall on peace
    And dream of breaking buds and blossoming.
Of primrose airs, of days of large increase,
    And all the coloured retinue of spring.
 
John Drinkwater (1882-1937)

Invictus

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.
​
William Ernest Henley (1849-1903)

New Every Morning

Every day is a fresh beginning,
Listen my soul to the glad refrain.
And, spite of old sorrows
And older sinning,
Troubles forecasted
And possible pain,
​Take heart with the day and begin again.
​
Susan Coolidge (1835-1905)

Nightfall

She sits beside: through four low panes of glass
The sun, a misty meadow, and the stream;
Falling through rounded elms the last sunbeam.
Through night's thick fibre sudden barges pass
With great forelights of gold, with trailing mass
Of timber: rearward of their transient gleam
The shadows settle, and profounder dream
Enters, fulfils the shadows. Vale and grass
Are now no more; a last leaf strays about,
Then every wandering ceases; we remain.
Clear dusk, the face of wind is on the sky:
The eyes I love lift to the upper pane--
Their voice gives note of welcome quietly
‘I love the air in which the stars come out.’

Michael Field (1846-1914)

Snow

Look up...
From bleakening hills
Blows doen the light first breath
Of wintry wind... look up, and scent
The snow!

Adelaide Crapsey (1878–1914)

So Breaks The Sun
 
So breaks the sun earth’s rugged chains,
Wherein rude winter bound her veins;
So grows both stream and source of price,
That lately fettered were with ice.
So naked trees get crisped heads,
And coloured coats the roughest meads,
And all get vigour, youth and sprite,
That are but looked on by his light.
 
Ben Jonson (1572-1637) ​

From The Garden (From Gilbert)
 
Above the city hung the moon,
Right o’er a plot of ground
Where flowers and orchard-trees were fenced
With lofty walls around:
‘Twas Gilbert’s garden, there to-night
Awhile he walked alone;
And, tired with sedentary toil,
Mused where the moonlight shone.
 
This garden, in a city-heart,
Lay still as houseless wild,
Though many-windowed mansion fronts
Were round it; closely piled;
But thick their walls, and those within
Lived lives by noise unstirred;
Like wafting of an angel’s wing,
Time’s flight by them was heard.
 
Some soft piano-notes alone
Were sweet as faintly given,
Where ladies, doubtless, cheered the hearth
With song that winter-even.
The city’s many mingled sounds
Rose like the hum of ocean;
They rather lulled the heart than roused
Its pulse to faster motion.
 
Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855)

The Gulls

Soft is the sky in the mist-kirtled east,
Light is abroad on the sea,
All of the heaven with silver is fleeced,
Holding the sunrise in fee.
Lo! with a flash and uplifting of wings
Down where the long ripples break,
Cometh a bevy of glad-hearted things,
'Tis morn, for the gulls are awake.
​
Lucy Maud Montgomery (1874-1942)

The Herding

Quietly, quietly in from the fields
Of the grey Atlantic the billows come,
Like sheep to the fold.
Shorn by the rocks of fleecy foam,
They sink on the brown seaweed at home;
And a bell, like that of a bellwether,
Is scarcely heard from the buoy --
Save when they suddenly stumble together
In herded hurrying joy,
Upon its guidance: then soft music
From it is tolled.
Far out in the murk that follows them in
Is heard the call of the fog-horn's voice,
Like a shepherd's — low.
And the strays as if waiting it seem to pause
And lift their heads and listen — because
It is sweet from wandering ways to be driven,
When we have fearless breasts,
When all that we strayed for has been given,
When no want molests
Us more — no need of the tide's ebbing
And tide’s flow.
​
Cale Young Rice ( 1872-1943)

The Lake Isle of Innisfree
​
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
​
​William Butler Yeats (1865-1939).

There Is a Budding Morrow in Midnight

Wintry boughs against a wintry sky;
Yet the sky is partly blue
And the clouds are partly bright:--
Who can tell but sap is mounting high
Out of sight,
Ready to burst through?
​
Winter is the mother-nurse of Spring,
Lovely for her daughter's sake,
Not unlovely for her own:
For a future buds in everything;
Grown, or blown,
Or about to break.
​
Christina Georgina Rossetti 1830-1894)

The Shepherd Wind
 
When hills and plains are powdered white,
  And bitter cold the north wind blows,
Upon my window in the night
  A fairy-garden grows.
 
    Here poppies that no hand hath sown
  Bloom white as foam upon the sea,
And elfin bells to earth unknown
  Hold frost-bound melody.
 
    And here are blossoms like to stars
  Tangled in nets of silver lace--
My very breath their beauty mars,
  Or stirs them from their place.
 
    Perchance the echoes of old songs
  Found here a resting place at last
With drifting perfume that belongs
  To roses of the past.
 
    Or all the moonbeams that were lost
  On summer nights the world forgets
May here be prisoned by the frost
  With souls of violets.
 
    The wind doth shepherd many things--
  And when the nights are long and cold,
Who knows how strange a flock he brings
  All safely to the fold.
 
Virna Sheard (1862-1943)

The True Beauty

He that loves a rosy cheek
Or a coral lip admires,
Or from starlike eyes doth seek
Fuel to maintain his fires;
As old Time makes these decay,
So his flames must waste away.But a smooth and steadfast mind,
Gentle thoughts, and calm desires,
Hearts with equal love combined,
Kindle never-dying fires: --
Where these are not, I despise
Lovely cheeks or lips or eyes.
​
​Thomas Carew (1598-1639)

From The Villager’s Verse-Book The Blacksmith
 
 How cheerful in the winter’s night,
As down the lane I stray;
The blacksmith’s forge shoots out its light,
And shines across the way!
 
 The smith his labouring bellows blows,
And now his stroke repeats;
Beats the red iron, as it glows,
And shapes it as he beats.
 
 While, flash! The frequent sparkles fly,
And tongs are hissing red;
Content and cheerful industry
Sweeten his daily bread.
 
William Lisle Bowles (1762-1850)

The Wood

I walked a nut-wood's gloom. And overhead
A pigeon's wing beat on the hidden boughs,
And shrews upon shy tunnelling woke thin
Late winter leaves with trickling sound.Across
My narrow path I saw the carrier ants
Burdened with little pieces of bright straw.
These things I heard and saw, with senses fine
For all the little traffic of the wood,
While everywhere, above me, underfoot,

​And haunting every avenue of leaves,
Was mystery, unresting, taciturn.
And haunting the lucidities of life
That are my daily beauty, moves a theme,
Beating along my undiscovered mind.

John Drinkwater (1882-1937)

To a Thrush
 
In the hour before the dawn,
    In the hour when dreams are true,
When the moonlight’s on the lawn
    And the grass is hoar with dew,
 
Ere the clarion cock’s astir
    Or the cattle in the byre--
Come and perch upon the fir,
    Come and take the topmost spire!
 
I shall wake and, through the pane,
    I thy silhouette shall see,
I shall hear thy magic strain,
    Rapturous thrush!— and bless thy tree.
 
Never thrilled through mortal ear
    Earthly music more divine;
Never tree-top soared so near
God’s own Paradise as thine!
 
Let me, till the moon has set
    And the darkness stills thy strain,
Listen; then, with eyelids wet,
Turn to happy sleep again.
 
William Canton (1845-1926)

See poems for other seasons