Today’s Poem: Winter: A Dirge
The exterior cold that matches the interior chill
Winter: A Dirge
by Robert Burns
The wintry west extends his blast, And hail and rain does blaw; Or, the stormy north sends driving forth The blinding sleet and snaw: While, tumbling brown, the burn comes down, And roars frae bank to brae; And bird and beast in covert rest, And pass the heartless day. “The sweeping blast, the sky o’ercast,” The joyless winter-day Let others fear, to me more dear Than all the pride of May: The tempest’s howl, it soothes my soul, My griefs it seems to join; The leafless trees my fancy please, Their fate resembles mine! Thou Power Supreme whose mighty scheme These woes of mine fulfil, Here, firm, I rest; they must be best, Because they are Thy will! Then all I want — O do Thou grant This one request of mine. — Since to enjoy Thou dost deny, Assist me to resign. ═════════════════════════
“Winter: A Dirge” is a fairly early poem from Robert Burns (1759–1796), written in 1781 during his stay at Irvine in Ayrshire and included in his first book, the 1786 Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect.
Burns’s time at Irvine was curious. He had gone to be a flax-dresser (combing out the coarse parts of flax with a steel comb, to make fiber to spin as thread for linen), but it was there he also began to receive encouragement as a poet — and was able to read more widely. And it was there that he seems to have felt some of the bite of moral depression. Burns was never above using a persona, adopting a position that fit the poetic thought rather than his actual feelings, but there was some honesty in the line he took in Today’s Poem.
The poem consists of three eight-line stanzas of ballad meter — alternating four- and three-foot lines, rhymed on the short lines (2 and 4, and 6 and 8), with an internal rhyme of the second and fourth stresses in the four-foot lines (“Thou Power Su-prème whose mighty scheme . . . / Here, firm, I rèst; they must be bèst”). And through those stanzas, Burns lays out a moral logic.
The harshness of winter — hail and rain, sleet and snow — reveals the “heartless day,” in the first stanza. But the second stanza reverses expectation by claiming that the “joyless winter-day” is “to me more dear / Than all the pride of May.” (Burns puts the first line of this second stanza in quotation marks to indicate an unnecessary reference to Edward Young, author of the widely read 1742 Night-Thoughts.) The winter actually soothes the tormented soul by providing an objective reality that matches the inner sorrow. And the third stanza brings the point home. The objective pain of winter teaches the poet of the need for peaceful resignation to the will of the Divine.
