The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o’clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days. T S Eliot, Preludes, 1917
In the bleak mid-winter
Frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow,
Snow on snow,
In the bleak mid-winter,
Long ago. Christina Rossetti, Mid-Winter, 1875
There’s a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons –
That oppresses like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes. Emily Dickinson, There’s a Certain Slant of Light, 1861
What good is the warmth of summer, without the cold of winter to give it sweetness. John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glotter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and nothing that is. Wallace Stevens, The Snow Man, 1921
She turned to the sunlight
And shook her yellow head,
And whispered to her neighbor:
‘Winter is dead.’ A A Milne, When We Were Very Young
An age in her embraces passed
Would seem a winter’s day,
Where life and light with envious haste
Are torn and snatched away. John Wilmot, Lord Rochester, ‘The Mistress: A Song’, 1691
Let no man boast himself that he has got through the perils of winter till at least the seventh of May. Anthony Trollope, Doctor Thorne
Now it’s Siberia! Cliff Michelmore, The Big Freeze, BBC 1963
Will go down as the terrible winder of 1963. ibid.
There were gusts of ninety miles an hour and it was bitterly cold. ibid.
There were now drifts of fifteen and twenty feet. ibid.
If things were bad on the railway, they were equally chaotic at airports. ibid.
A monstrously memorable winter, a tragic winter. ibid.
Now the unrelenting frost. ibid.
The Channel froze at Dover and Eastbourne. ibid.
Chaos turned into crisis. ibid.
Death toll at 120. ibid.
We’re going back fifty years to the big freeze of 1963. Winterwatch 1963 – The Big Freeze, BBC 2013
Vast flocks of waders gathering at their high tide roost, millions of starlings performing their fabulous aerial acrobatics, and the sound of wild geese filling the air. ibid.
From Boxing Day 1962 to early March ’63 the whole country lay under a thick blanket of snow and ice. ibid.
What an extraordinary film ... What that film didn’t explain was what effect the big freeze had on our British wildlife: ibid.
The wrathful winter, ’proaching on apace,
With blustering blasts had all ybared the treen,
And old Saturnus, with his frosty face,
With chilling cold had pierced the tender green ...
And sorrowing I to see the summer flowers,
The lively green, the lusty leas, forlorn,
The sturdy trees so shattered with the showers,
The fields so fade that flourished so beforn,
It taught me well all earthly things be born
To die the death, for nought long time may last;
The summer beauty yields to winter’s blast. Thomas Sackville, The Mirror for Magistrates, 1563
Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen. Willa Cather, American novelist
Winter is the time for comfort, for good food and warmth, for the touch of a friendly hand and for a talk beside the fire: it is the time for home. Edith Sitwell
We stood by a pond that winter day,
And the sun was white, as though chidden of God,
And a few leaves lay on the starving sod;
– They had fallen from an ash, and were gray. Thomas Hardy, Neutral Tones
Then there was the bad weather. It would come in one day when the fall was over. We would have to shut the windows in the night against the rain and the cold wind would strip the leaves from the trees in Place Contrescarpe. The leaves lay sodden in the rain and the wind drove the rain against the big green autobus at the terminal and the Cafe des Amateurs was crowded and the windows misted over the heat and the smoke inside. It was a sad, evilly run café where the drunkards of the quarter crowded together and I kept away from it because of the smell of dirty bodies and the soul smell of drunkeness. Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast p1
All the sadness of the city came suddenly with the first cold rains of winter, and there were no more tops of the high white houses as you walked but only the wet blackness of the street and the closed doors of the small shops, the herb sellers, the stationery and the newspaper shops, the midwife – second class – and the hotel where Verlaine had died, where I had a room on the top floor where I worked. ibid. p2
The Svalbard winter – A night that last for months. Earth’s Greatest Spectacles II: Svalbard, BBC 2016
There are only two seasons – Winter and Baseball. Bill Veeck
Imagine a winter equivalent to seven ‘beasts from the east’ one after the other. In 1963 this is exactly what happened. Britain called the worst winter for over two hundred and fifty years The Big Freeze lasting for ten long weeks. Tempretures below twenty-two degrees centigrade. The Big Freeze: Winter ’63, Channel 5 2022
As temperatures started to drop and millions of Londoners sparked up their coal fires a freezing toxic cocktail of polluted smog smothered the capital. ibid.
It’s hard to describe how still it is on a glacier surrounded by a fresh blanket on snow. A Year on Planet Earth I: Winter, ITV 2023
Svalbard, Arctic Circle: By late October most animals have already fled south … The northern hemisphere is tilted as far away from the sun as it can. ibid.