A winter’s tale

The Weekend Australian

28 August 2010

Lamenting the loss of deep winter in a warming world.

A cold coming we had of it,Just the worst time of the yearFor a journey, and such a journey:The ways deep and the weather sharp,The very dead of winter.

The opening lines from T. S. Eliot's Journey of the Magi were committed to memory years ago; I'm of a generation that was required not only to study poetry but to learn it by heart. And they came to me unbidden as I gathered my thoughts for this column, which is to be a kind of paean to winter.

It is mid-August as I write and already the hard seasoning is softening. A migratory crane is cutting circles in a cornflower-blue sky, the temperature is a balmy 19 degrees, and the sun shines with such unseasonal force that the pale bare limbs of the tree outside the window throw off a glimmer like tinfoil.

There is a scent of lavender on the air, and buzzing around on this rather cloying perfume are the season's first, rather stupefied, bees.

With all this fresh life and sap -- "the force that through the green fuse drives the flower" -- it may seem churlish to mourn the passing of winter.

Spring, after all, is the season of lovers and pastoral lyrics. Yet there is a kind of poetry in winter, too. It is worth recalling in this, the hottest year on record, when the climate is changing in ways that are little understood.

For Samuel Taylor Coleridge, winter was a mystical time of inner radiance, and he wrote, in Frost at Midnight, of the snow melting from the eaves to form:

... silent icicles,Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.

John Donne wrote his grim nocturnal on the shortest day of the year, St Lucy's Day:

Tis the year's midnight, and it is the day'sLucy's, who scarce seven hours her face unmasks;The sun is spent, and now his flasksSend forth light squibs, no constant rays.

Donne's nocturnal is a work of deep mourning and its mood is entirely sepulchral. The poet identifies himself so completely with the absence of light, life and warmth that he is left to embrace only "absence, darkness, death - things which are not".

But perhaps this is the point of much wintry art: to sing the darkness from our souls. For isn't lamentation, too, a kind of song?

I said much wintry art, not all. For one of the most radiant works of modern literature, Patrick Leigh Fermor's A Time of Gifts, the memoir of a journey undertaken as an 18-year-old through pre-war Europe, unrolls across a gorgeous winter landscape silenced by snow. Paddy's journey begins in early December 1933 from London Bridge, when he steps aboard a Dutch steamer bound for the Hook of Holland. The next morning he sets out from Rotterdam on foot. "Snow covered everything and the flakes blew in a slant across the cones of the lamps and confused the glowing disks that spaced out the untrodden quay," he writes.

But in less than an hour he is "crunching steadily" along the icy ruts of a dyke road. He passes from one hushed village to another: "All was frozen. There was a particular delight in treading across the hard puddles. The grey disks and pods of ice creaked under hobnails and clogs with a mysterious sigh of captive air; then they split into stars and whitened as the spiders-web fissures expanded."

This last passage is from the Winterreise, or winter's journey, the title piece of Franz Schubert's magnificent song cycle. There is an anxious quality to the leider of Schubert's Winterreise but also a sense that the lone wanderer finds his soul's truest mirror in winter's gales and tempests:

My heart sees in the heavensIts own picture unspoiltIt's nothing but the Winter,The Winter, cold and wild.

I don't want to romanticise winter. The season brings to mind images not only of wandering poets but of peasants seven to a darkened room, huddling to keep warm. There's certainly nothing poetic about vitamin D deficiency.

But for all its hardships winter is also the season when as the sun's light dims -- sending Donne's "light squibs" - the creative spirit warms.

The 2009 Italian film Dieci Inverni is a delicate though rather pained contemporary love story filmed, as its title suggests, across 10 consecutive winters, mostly in Venice.

The story is focused on the journey of two star-crossed 18-year-olds. Camilla, played by Isabella Ragonese, is fond of winter. She finds it "fortifying".

And so it is.

Friedrich Nietzsche traced the birth of tragedy to the Greek god Dionysus, and it was in winter - the season of new wine - that Greeks of the countryside honoured Dionysus, the deity of letting go, with performances of tragedy and comedy.

Western theatre is a child of winter.

Add to this the purity and radiance of fresh snow, and the contemplative silence that runs through so much poetry of winter, and you have a season to celebrate.

If we lose something of winter we not only lose three months of cold and a few drawers of jumpers; we lose something of the culture, and perhaps something of the soul. *