WINTER WITH THE POETS.
By The Editor.
OUR prose writers have many winter scenes worthy of reading and remembrance (notably such as are found in the writings of Charles Dickens and Nathaniel Hawthorne) which might almost be called prose poems; but to-day we will wander together through the flower gardens of the real poets, whose eyes were made clearer to see the beauties of the world around them, by the loving attention they gave to common things.
There is a rabbinical fable to the effect that Jesus was once passing along a crowded city street, and that he came to a place where lay, unsightly, ragged and bruised, a dead dog. The disciples said, “What does this carrion here? throw it out of the Master’s way.” But the Master said, “Look what beautiful teeth—they are white as pearls!”
So the poet finds “nothing common or unclean” in anything that God has made, and man has not marred; and even, as in the case of the poor, ill-used animal, finds something left to admire in the wreck and ruin of former beauty. And though winter wrecks the beauty of the summer, it has a beauty of its own.
For a country winter in New England there is no better description than Whittier’s “Snow-Bound” and for the same season in Old England parts of Cowper’s “Winter Evening,” “Winter Morning Walk” and “Winter Walk at Noon.” Longfellow has a description of winter in “Hiawatha” and a winter storm at sea in the “Wreck of the Hesperus.”
Shakespeare has scattered references to winter throughout his plays; but he is rather the poet of human life and society than of inanimate nature.
James Thomson, who wrote “The Seasons,” has a fine description of Winter; and every one should know by heart the first twenty lines of his “Hymn on the Seasons.”
Percy Bysshe Shelley has some beautiful lines on a winter’s night; and Tennyson has many fine lines, “The Death of the Old Year,” and parts of “In Memoriam” being the finest.
Would it not be interesting to each one of the readers of the Grammar School to gather together all the references to winter thoughts and scenery to be found in the writings of their favorite poet? Try and see!