It’s January: for those of us in the northern hemisphere, the nights are long and the days are bitterly cold. For many, now is a season of new beginnings; of setting goals and fighting to achieve them. But thriving in January can feel—sometimes—an awful lot like trying to rise from the depths of a pond whose surface has frozen over.
If you’re struggling to break through the hard shell of January into the new year, these twelve poems might be just the thing you need. Not optimistic but stubborn, they tell tales of ice and persistence in the gloomiest month of the year.
“Shelter From the Storm” – The Stupendium
No gold or silver, coal’s the only thing of worth to me
The only precious metal to our name would be the mercury
That fragile strip of burgundy that ever hurtles to the deep
Alerting us as Mother Nature’s taking every cursed degree…
Unlike the other poetry on this list, “Shelter From the Storm” is a song, created by The Stupendium—a musician known for their nerdy verses inspired by various video games. This particular song tackles Frostpunk, a city-building survival game which takes place in an alternate-19th century London beset by an intense volcanic winter. With its tight rhyme scheme and intricate lyrics, its chorus reminiscent of a sea shanty or work song, this song paints a picture of hardship and endurance, and is motivating to listen to even if you’ve never played the game.
“Undoing” – Khadijah Queen
In winter traffic, fog of midday
shoves toward our machines—snow eclipses
the mountainscapes
I drive toward, keeping time against
the urge to quit moving…
There is something gritty and indomitable woven through this poem by the winner of the 2021 William Carlos Williams Award for poetry. It evokes bleak environmental fears with precision as cutting as the cold—yet even as the ice closes in, the narrator is determined to keep going.
“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” – Robert Frost
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year…
This quiet, wistful poem from 1923 captures a brief moment of stillness in an unnamed traveller’s nighttime journey through the snow. What is his story? Why has he paused? There’s something eerie about this tranquil scene, and much opportunity to speculate.
“Tinnitus: January, thin rain becoming ice” – David Harsent
The spirit lamp in that house on the headland could easily fall and spill
and the fire burn all night…
This frosty seaside scene is rich with ominous detail which truly captures the uncertainty of January. Read this poem and you’ll find yourself hearing the ghostly whisper of waves upon the shore.
“January Thaw” – Rosalie Dunlap Hickler
There was rain in the night, a dull delivering rain
That washed the air of sparkle and hard blue gleam…
Penned in 1930, this poem illustrates the turn of the seasons: from bright, hard, sparkling ice there rises determined plant life and rushing water. And with it, laughter. If you’re in need of a reminder that this winter won’t last forever, look here and watch the first tendrils of spring as the cold recedes.
“Winter Flowers” – Stanley Moss
Once my friends and I went out in deep paradise snow
with Saint Bernards and Great Pyrenees
to find those lost in the blizzard that God made for Himself
because He prefers not seeing what happens on earth…
Building on the tentative optimism of the previous poem, this one follows its narrator through a snowy landscape. The narrator, on their journey, is inspired into a surreal and speculative back-and-forth with God.
“Blizzard” – Linda Pastan
The snow
has forgotten
how to stop
it falls
stuttering
at the glass…
Just as it seemed the seasons might be turning—here comes another relentless snowfall. With short, abrupt lines and beautiful simile, this poem narrates a cold snap in a way that will make you yearn for a blanket.
“January” – Nancy Schoenberger
Two-faced god, looking fore and aft:
Do you really belong to past
glories, boredoms, indignities?…
This poem from 1998 (almost the turn of the millennium!) marks the turn of December into a new year with a contemplation of Janus, the two-faced Roman god of duality for which January is named.
“Iron Burns Out” – R.B. Lemberg
Sól ek sá (I saw the sun)
when I was by a great grief stricken,
tilting out of this world; my tongue was as trees in winter
ok kólnat at fyrir utan (and around me, coldness)…
In evocative, fantastical language, this poem describes the feeling of having no time to rest despite a dire need for it…of putting other things—more important things—first. The verses dance between ice and snowmelt, exhaustion and resolve. If you’re already feeling the pressures of the new year, this might be a good poem to read.
“Cradling Fish” – Laura Ma
Winter storm: lightning flashes old ghosts on my blade. The
metal light as a carp piercing through the dragon’s gate.When shīfù still lived: she taught me that growth is a shattering
of murky fins raining into silver scales, thata promise means swimming against the current, flailing
up from the river to chance immortal wells…
This beautiful wuxia poem begins with ice and ends with summer. With vivid imagery, it illustrates the shifting of relationships that comes with the shifting of the seasons.
“January, 1795” – Mary Robinson
Pavement slipp’ry, people sneezing,
Lords in ermine, beggars freezing;
Titled gluttons dainties carving,
Genius in a garret starving…
The oldest poem on this list, this piece by Mary Robinson takes you back to a very specific January in 1795. Though over 200 years separate us from its creation, there is something deeply familiar about the scenes it brings to life in rhyme. A reminder that people have always been people, and January has always been January.
“Unlike objects, two stories can occupy the same space” – Charles Peek
Out along the last curve in the brick walk
the grass has begun to green,
with the freezing cold and coming snow
its certain fate…
This final poem encapsulates the themes of all the previous: of cycles, of ice and summer locked in a dance. There may be false starts, and the progress made in spring or summer may feel as though it’s been undone by the harshness of the cold seasons when they arrive. But this—Peek reminds us—is okay.
***
Do you have any favourite poems about snow and ice? And what are you doing to dust off the ice at the start of this new year? Let me know in the comments.
Holly Kybett Smith is a writer and a recent graduate in MA in Victorian Gothic. A keen lover of historical and speculative fiction, she specialises in all things dark, whimsical and weird. Her work has been featured in Issue #2 of the New Gothic Review.
On the one hand, I hate to begin the comment-stream with the “I can’t believe this wasn’t on the list” shtick. But how can I not, when the poem I was expecting to find at the very top of the list wasn’t there at all?
Specifically:
The Cremation of Sam McGee by Robert W. Service:
There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
I cremated Sam McGee.
I have been a Service fan since roughly kindergarten, because my father included the foregoing and “The Shooting of Dan McGrew” in his rotation of bedtime-story material, thereby forever ensuring that I would become a fierce and eternal defender of the art of narrative balladry and the proposition that verse-that-actually-rhymes-and-scans-damnit remains an important part of the poetic tradition. (I have mellowed somewhat over time, and no longer rant about the evils of free verse as I occasionally did in high school and college, but no one is taking away my collected volumes of Service, Kipling, or Gilbert-and-Sullivan while I’m still occupying this plane of existence.)
I will also mention one more Service poem here, purely to illustrate for those who know him only from McGee and Dan McGrew that he’s more versatile than those verses might suggest. That poem is “The Spell of the Yukon“, which is one of my all-time favorites by any author, and whose final stanza – for me, at least – puts him right up in Shakespeare territory; that stanza makes its case as eloquently as the final couplet of a well-framed sonnet, particularly in these two lines:
Yet it isn’t the gold that I’m wanting
So much as just finding the gold.
That sentence has been burned into my brain ever since I first read it (and that too was early in childhood); it’s long since become a defining component of my personality. Service can write long, rambling ballads with the best of them, but he is also absolutely brilliantly concise when he cares to be, and I admire him for both those gifts.
I love “The Cremation of Sam McGee”! I also memorized it when I was little because it was a campfire staple whenever my family would go camping–thanks for bringing it up, and bringing back some very fond memories :)
Oh, there are lots of those!
Starting with the coldest poem ever written:
The Snow Man, by Wallace Stevens.
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow…
A reconsideration off those woods and that snow:
Not Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening, by Jennifer Michael Hecht.
… He was always
going into the woods. It was he who wrote, The best way
out is always through. ….
More cheerfully,
Fire And Snow And Carnevale, by Macdara Woods
In winter fire is beautiful
and generous as music — may you
always come this safely home
in fire and snow and carnevale
And, because this too will pass, another song:
The January Man, by Dave Goulder
The January man he walks abroad
In woollen coat and boots of leather
The February man still shakes the snow
From off his hair and blows his hands
The man of March he sees the Spring and
Wonders what the year will bring
And hopes for better weather
Covered by a whole bunch of other people, easily found on youtube
Commenting not to recommend anything but to say that wow! Did the beginning of Linda Pastan’s “Blizzard” strike a chord! Daily snow shovelings here right now, piles up to the windows and stretching several meters, and still it just. Keeps. On. Coming. (Even now as I look out the window.)