Today’s Poem: Winter

Shakespeare’s cold-weather realism

Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Hunters in the Snow, 1565 (Wikimedia Commons)

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Winter

by William Shakespeare

When icicles hang by the wall,
    And Dick the shepherd blows his nail,
And Tom bears logs into the hall,
    And milk comes frozen home in pail,
When blood is nipp’d and ways be foul,
Then nightly sings the staring owl,
                Tu-whit; Tu-who, a merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

When all aloud the wind doth blow,
    And coughing drowns the parson’s saw,
And birds sit brooding in the snow,
    And Marion’s nose looks red and raw,
When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl,
Then nightly sings the staring owl,
                Tu-whit; Tu-who, a merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.
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Today’s Poem, by William Shakespeare (1564–1616), acknowledges what for many of us will seem the real bleak wintertime, begun in earnest. Though Christmastide continues for a few more days, the holidays begin to feel emphatically ended. Spring is still an eternity away.

It’s fitting, then, that we should feature this song from the final act of Shakespeare’s early play, Love’s Labour’s Lost, which brings the curtain down on a note, if of not out-and-out disappointment, then at least of joys postponed.

The play’s dramatic plot is roughly this: A group of earnest noblemen vow to shun the company of women and devote themselves to study — and we all know what happens when such a resolution is made. Almost immediately, as if they had been summoned into existence by that corporate vow, enter some ladies from the French court. Just as swiftly, not that you could see it coming or anything, the gentlemen are forsworn.

John Taylor, William Shakespeare, 1610 (Wikimedia Commons)

Hilarity ensues, largely at the expense of the men, whose will is so readily mastered by desire. Yet just as matters tend toward the resolution that marks such later comedies as A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with all disorder righted and everybody suitably married off, the death of the king of France intervenes. The anticipated marriages must be postponed. The men, so precipitate in their desire, must wait a year to realize its fulfillment. The end, more or less.

All this action culminates in two songs, sung by the buffoonish lover Don Armado. First, Armado sings of the springtime, in which the flowers “paint the meadows with delight,” and “on every tree,” the cuckoo — from whose name the word cuckold derives — mocks married men with its song, hinting at their wives’ infidelity. This song suggests the fool-making consequence of rushing the season.

“Winter,” however, like January itself, settles down to a drearier but more reliable realism. If its two nine-line tetrameter stanzas, rhymed ababccddd, evoke nothing beautiful, there’s something strangely reassuring in its stark imagery. “The words of Mercury,” says Armado at the close of the play, “are harsh after the songs of Apollo.” But there may be some comfort in observing that people busy trying to keep warm lack the wherewithal to make sport of anyone else. The staring owl’s song, straightforward and un-mocking, still sounds “a merry note,” hopeful in the cheerless cold.

Engraving of Armado and Moth, from an 1882 edition of Love's Labour's Lost (Wikimedia Commons)

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