Snow and Ice
Now that my own collection ‘Ghostly Stories and Snowy Poems' is doing so well, I’m convinced I’m not the only one who suffers from snow hunger.
My sister promised me snow and I’m still waiting, as though a present were tarrying at some postal depot; I have snow hunger; it is a craving for the white stuff and no, I certainly don’t mean anything remotely connected with the colloquialisms of drug use and abuse. The precipitation of ice crystals is enough in itself to generate snow euphoria.
The New Year has come and gone. Twelfth Night is approaching but the snow remains a dream or memory; it doesn’t, of course, help that I don’t live in the middle of a country with a continental climate, where being knee-deep in flakes of crystalline water-ice might be a measure of some informal accuracy, where you would know when to slip on the Yaktrax, put on the winter tyres or begin to build the snowman. But then, everyone has to be somewhere and I just happen to be at the edge of the North Sea.
It’s quite simple; I feel the call of winter and the need for snow and ice. I crave the sheer glittering whiteness, the bated breath brightness of a winter world; some might say it is a romantic illusion, that winter is harsh, remorseless. Yes, it can be. When Christina Rossetti was describing the bleak mid-winter – ‘Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow -’ a chilling and inexorable repetition, she knew that this weather, characterising the end of the Little ice Age was pitiless. She wasn’t describing a scene in the Middle East any more than Eliot was in his Journey of the Magi.
Both were depicting the intransigently cruel world they knew and a season not so far removed from the winters depicted by the Breughels. But if there is one thing that is evident it is that although the winter is harsh and the weather relentlessly cold, many people are determined to have some fun. Sliding, skating, throwing snowballs, building snowmen.
And so was it too in the paintings by Avercamp. People are skating and dancing on the ice however much they might have set out to do something serious, such as collecting kindling for the fire at home. And it isn’t a bad way to keep warm. But who is willing to skate or dance outside on a chill, drizzly snowless day?
And the thing is – I hate being cold. I love being outside, well-wrapped up on a winter walk in the woods but when I come back I want the real warmth inside the house. There is something about a damp, mould and moss-covered winter, something that is about as depressing and dispiriting as it can get. Something deadly.
In Northern Europe there is a puritan voice that tells people it is good for the body and soul to be cold, miserable and damp. It isn’t.
If you live in a land with a temperate climate where winters are chill and rainy, you are much more likely to suffer from hypothermia than if you had to contend with a really cold winter, too cold for snow. People who have to live through very harsh winters understand this absolutely.
Lara, in 'Dr Zhivago' has a great talent for very quickly creating a warm and comfortable nest within a frozen exterior. In the film they got it wrong when they portrayed Yuri writing in a ice-filled room on a frozen table. In the book he’s snug and cosy.
So we in a temperate climate have to create our own winters, in the snow landscapes of the imagination. For a child, a snow-covered Narnia with a lamppost is the epitome of both a threatening freeze and a cosy retreat. But I’m a grown-up, am I not? So what do I do? All the snowy scenes come to mind from different books, from the winter entries of Francis Kilvert’s diary to the beginning of Sayers’ Nine tailors’ (the best part), from Andersen’s “The Snow Queen’, a story I first read when I was nine years old to Kavenna’s The ice Museum, a search for the legendary Thule. The winter scenes in ‘War and Peace’ and ‘Dr Zhivago’ spring into my mind. And scenes from books hitherto forgotten emerge from their own frosty hibernation.
And of course the numerous poems...... I can mention randomly the wintry poems of Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson, or Mary Oliver Keats and Wallace Stevens – there are few poets who have not written about snow. And that goes for me too.
The collection ‘Ghostly Stories and Snowy Poems’ came into being after a number of tales and verses were written, through the years, in an attempt to capture an otherwordly Spirit of Winter. And it does seem that a lot of people like them. It may now be a wet, sunny, warmish and fungus-filled winter but the real seasons are the seasons of the Imagination. And for author and reader, that’s what it’s all about, really.
My sister promised me snow and I’m still waiting, as though a present were tarrying at some postal depot; I have snow hunger; it is a craving for the white stuff and no, I certainly don’t mean anything remotely connected with the colloquialisms of drug use and abuse. The precipitation of ice crystals is enough in itself to generate snow euphoria.
The New Year has come and gone. Twelfth Night is approaching but the snow remains a dream or memory; it doesn’t, of course, help that I don’t live in the middle of a country with a continental climate, where being knee-deep in flakes of crystalline water-ice might be a measure of some informal accuracy, where you would know when to slip on the Yaktrax, put on the winter tyres or begin to build the snowman. But then, everyone has to be somewhere and I just happen to be at the edge of the North Sea.
It’s quite simple; I feel the call of winter and the need for snow and ice. I crave the sheer glittering whiteness, the bated breath brightness of a winter world; some might say it is a romantic illusion, that winter is harsh, remorseless. Yes, it can be. When Christina Rossetti was describing the bleak mid-winter – ‘Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow -’ a chilling and inexorable repetition, she knew that this weather, characterising the end of the Little ice Age was pitiless. She wasn’t describing a scene in the Middle East any more than Eliot was in his Journey of the Magi.
Both were depicting the intransigently cruel world they knew and a season not so far removed from the winters depicted by the Breughels. But if there is one thing that is evident it is that although the winter is harsh and the weather relentlessly cold, many people are determined to have some fun. Sliding, skating, throwing snowballs, building snowmen.
And so was it too in the paintings by Avercamp. People are skating and dancing on the ice however much they might have set out to do something serious, such as collecting kindling for the fire at home. And it isn’t a bad way to keep warm. But who is willing to skate or dance outside on a chill, drizzly snowless day?
And the thing is – I hate being cold. I love being outside, well-wrapped up on a winter walk in the woods but when I come back I want the real warmth inside the house. There is something about a damp, mould and moss-covered winter, something that is about as depressing and dispiriting as it can get. Something deadly.
In Northern Europe there is a puritan voice that tells people it is good for the body and soul to be cold, miserable and damp. It isn’t.
If you live in a land with a temperate climate where winters are chill and rainy, you are much more likely to suffer from hypothermia than if you had to contend with a really cold winter, too cold for snow. People who have to live through very harsh winters understand this absolutely.
Lara, in 'Dr Zhivago' has a great talent for very quickly creating a warm and comfortable nest within a frozen exterior. In the film they got it wrong when they portrayed Yuri writing in a ice-filled room on a frozen table. In the book he’s snug and cosy.
So we in a temperate climate have to create our own winters, in the snow landscapes of the imagination. For a child, a snow-covered Narnia with a lamppost is the epitome of both a threatening freeze and a cosy retreat. But I’m a grown-up, am I not? So what do I do? All the snowy scenes come to mind from different books, from the winter entries of Francis Kilvert’s diary to the beginning of Sayers’ Nine tailors’ (the best part), from Andersen’s “The Snow Queen’, a story I first read when I was nine years old to Kavenna’s The ice Museum, a search for the legendary Thule. The winter scenes in ‘War and Peace’ and ‘Dr Zhivago’ spring into my mind. And scenes from books hitherto forgotten emerge from their own frosty hibernation.
And of course the numerous poems...... I can mention randomly the wintry poems of Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson, or Mary Oliver Keats and Wallace Stevens – there are few poets who have not written about snow. And that goes for me too.
The collection ‘Ghostly Stories and Snowy Poems’ came into being after a number of tales and verses were written, through the years, in an attempt to capture an otherwordly Spirit of Winter. And it does seem that a lot of people like them. It may now be a wet, sunny, warmish and fungus-filled winter but the real seasons are the seasons of the Imagination. And for author and reader, that’s what it’s all about, really.
No comments have been added yet.
