January 28, 2022
In a volume called The Snow Poems, the poet A.R. Ammons once wrote,
who who had
anything else
to be interested
in would be
interested in
the weather
The weather is what introverts like me talk about to cover up our inability to make real conversation. I plead as excuse only that the weather here in Cleveland this past week has insisted on my attention. We have had close to two feet of snow within the last week: a one-foot snowstorm, a six-inch snowstorm, and several smaller accumulations—and it is snowing again right now. Temperatures have gone down into the single digits night after night. Coping with the weather has become something like a full-time job: not just the endless shoveling but figuring out how to replace a mailbox taken out by the snowplow when the ground is frozen, buying endless gallons of distilled water for half a dozen humidifiers, dealing with the inability of UPS to deliver necessary timothy hay for the guinea pigs.
I’m not really complaining: I know that all this is nothing compared to what happens in places that get real winter weather: in Wyoming, in Minnesota, in Maine, in Saskatchewan. I remember the story told me by a friend in graduate school about how, on her husband’s family’s farm in Saskatchewan during a snowstorm, you held on to a rope stretched from the house to the barn in walking from one to the other because otherwise you would be instantly disoriented in the snow and die lost in a world of whiteness. But it does bring up the subject of what the imagination makes of winter.
Ammons’s chief literary precursor, Wallace Stevens, wrote about the weather a lot and in fact titled one of his pieces “Poems of Our Climate.” But what climate is that? In the West, the literary imagination of winter has presupposed a European norm that does not even fit all of the United States beyond the Northeast and Midwest. During the hiring process when I was department chair, we brought in a candidate who had grown up in Mississippi and done his graduate work in Florida: he had never seen snow before. By the time we left the restaurant in a snow-pummeled January much like this one, the temperature had already dropped to zero, and Michael later remarked that what he chiefly learned was how such intense, dry cold makes the hairs inside your nostrils prickle. He did not know about scrapers for clearing the ice off your windshield. From a world perspective, winter, at least the kind of winter characterized by snow, ice, and cold, is a local phenomenon. Is there in fact anything universal about it at all?
From a mythical perspective, winter as a season is a mistake, a product of fall or decline, not part of the original divine plan. The Bible never says that nature fell along with humanity, but that belief grew up in later tradition to account for the many inhospitable aspects of nature that surely could not have been part of the Creation that God found good in the opening of Genesis. So after the fall of Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost, Milton duly shows angels altering the configuration of the heavens in order to produce weather and the seasons as we unfortunately know them. Before that, “Spring and Autumn here / Danc’d hand in hand” (5.394-95), implying that in Eden there was a cycle of three seasons, autumn passing directly back to spring again. It is possible that Milton was remembering the paradisal vision of the wedding masque in Act 4 of Shakespeare’s Tempest, in which the goddess Ceres says, “Spring come to you at the farthest / At the very end of harvest.” Neither did winter exist in the myth of the Four Ages of the world in the Classical tradition. In the Metamorphoses, Ovid says that in the original Golden Age, “Spring was forever.” After the world declined into the subsequent Silver Age “Jove made the springtime shorter, added winter, / Summer, and autumn, the seasons as we know them” (Book 1, Rolfe Humphries translation). On the quasi-utopian island of Scheria, home of the Phaiakians in the Odyssey, there is an orchard in which “Fruit never failed upon these trees: winter / and summer time they bore” (7.124-25, Robert Fitzgerald translation).
Can the imagination, then, conceive a kind of unfallen winter, free of the harsh conditions that we now endure, and perhaps with unique attractions of its own, making the alteration of the seasons something like the alteration of day and night in Milton’s heaven, for “Change delectable, not need” (5. 629)? The popular imagination does exactly that. It is easy to look down upon the idealized images of Christmas by Hallmark, but to many people there is a genuine appeal in the possibility of a “winter wonderland.” My father was always slightly depressed whenever we did not manage to have a “white Christmas”—"just like the ones I used to know,” as Bing Crosby sings. People love skating, skiing, sledding; the neighboring town of Medina has an annual ice sculpture contest. Snow is transformational. A moderate snowfall makes the boring everyday environment into a new world: white magic. A huge snowfall alters the landscape itself. I was living in Buffalo when it was hit by its record 38-inch snowstorm. In fact, I shoveled all 38 inches of it out of my relationship’s driveway: the piles grew so tall that by the end I was having to throw snow over my head. The next day, sidewalks were tunnels, the snow piles on either side so tall you could not see over them. It was like walking in an ant colony, a labyrinth blinding white in the sunlight. Thank heaven we broke up before Buffalo got its 6-foot snowstorm later.
When the weather outside becomes just too “frightful,” there is the cozy pleasure of looking out at it from indoors, where “the fire is so delightful.” So “let it snow,” in the song of that title. Frank Loesser’s “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” (1944) is a call-and-response song in which the man tries to convince the woman to stay the night, again by the nice warm fire, with descriptions of how bad the weather is. But, as with much of the Great American Songbook, a wicked wit pulls the lyrics away from sentimentality—in this case in a direction that becomes a bit ominous, as the woman sings “The neighbors might think…/ Say what’s in this drink.” According to Wikipedia, the score labels the male and female voices as Wolf and Mouse.
At this point we have perhaps passed over into the negative connotations of winter, which greatly outnumber the positive. Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism links the four mythoi or universal plot patterns in literature to the four traditional seasons, winter being associated with irony and satire. From the viewpoint of mythology, winter as a natural season is what Frye would call a realistic displacement of a condition that is transcendent and eternal, preceding the creation of the world and its seasons. Unsurprisingly, we get the fullest treatment of this in Norse mythology, especially in the Elder Edda, setting aside the scholars’ warnings about how much the account has possibly been doctored by its compiler Snorri Sturluson. According to Robert Frost in his poem “Fire and Ice,” some say the world will end in fire, some in ice. Apparently it began in fire and ice as well. The Elder Edda shows us the beginning of all things in a conjunction of fire and ice, as a northern realm of cold, Nifelheim, interacts with a southern realm of fire, Muspelheim (the names vary), in the great void called Ginnungagap, out of which union emerges the cosmic frost giant Ymir. The gods kill Ymir and create the world from his body.
Ymir is one of a variety of immanent rather than transcendent deities, inherent within Creation rather than super-naturally above it. This modulates into the imagery of a demonic being or beings buried beneath the ice, usually at the South Pole, south being the “downward” direction on our maps. This shows up in Poe’s Narrative of A. Gordon Pym and H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness, and, in science fiction, John W. Campbell’s famous story “Who Goes There?” in which the demonic being is an alien rather than supernatural, made into a film called The Thing no fewer than three times, the first of them directed by Howard Hawks. In actual history, the unspeakable suffering of repeated expeditions to reach the South Pole indicates men in the grip of an obsession beyond the ordinary motivations of fame, fortune, and the record books. They were attempting to penetrate a realm beyond the limits of the human, and the powers that dwell there punished their hubris time after time.
However, by a curious mythological symmetry, the demonic wintry realm may be located “up” as well as “down.” This can mean the north, entrance to the underworld or land of the dead in some mythologies. Actual explorers seeking a Northwest Passage around the pole, such as Lord Franklin, in trying to get east by sailing west were unwittingly attempting to replicate the feat of Odysseus in the Odyssey, who enters the underworld after sailing northwest but exits it in the east, suggesting a pattern of death and rebirth that follows the path of the sun, which disappears under the earth in the west and rises the next morning in the east. The explorers found the death without the rebirth, at least so far as we know. “Up” does not always have to be north, however: it may be any high mountain range of eternal winter, sublime yet inhuman, such as the Himalayas or, in English literature, the Alps, where both Wordsworth and Shelley had very different epiphanies of a power behind appearances. It is the Alps through which his monster pursues Victor Frankenstein.
In a minor way I had my own experience of that winter boundary between the human and what lies beyond it. I was not trying to surpass the limits of the human condition, only trying to drive to graduate school, from Buffalo to the University of Toronto, in a car that died a few miles beyond the Peace Bridge, so that I had to try to walk back home across the bridge without even hat or gloves, which I had dazedly left in the car. There is always strong wind on the Peace Bridge, making the huge structure shake and vibrate. There are also gulls that wheel about
it endlessly, crying their excited cry as if exhilarated to be in their element. I was alone in the wind and predawn darkness, on my way to frostbite, feeling that I was crossing a very different boundary from the U.S.-Canadian border. Although I thought I just might die there, another part of me wished to stay, perhaps permanently, to be in my element like the gulls. But self-preservation triumphed, and I finally jumped out in front of a truck and more or less forced the driver to take me back to Buffalo.
Civilization insulates us from the fierceness of nature, but less than we would like to believe, a fact becoming increasingly obvious in a period of catastrophic climate change. How far the cycle of the seasons influences or even determines the cycles of history is a question explored in two fantasy series, Brian Aldiss’s Helliconia trilogy (1982-85) and George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, still ongoing, the forthcoming sixth volume to be titled The Winds of Winter. In Martin’s Game of Thrones saga, seasons apparently last for entire generations: in Helliconia, they last for centuries. What would it be like to grow up in a generation that had never known anything but winter? Actually, even those of us not suffering from seasonal affective disorder are so winter-weary by the time spring finally arrives that we feel winter really has lasted for a lifetime.
If we take one more step in this direction, we arrive at the insight that winter is psychological as well as meteorological, an inward condition as much as an external season or environment. That this is true of everything in the external world is one more aspect of our theme of the imagination as the home of human life. Subject and object are always interinvolved, though the link between them may be buried and unconscious. Science attempts to break this link and view the external world objectively, and a certain type of realism, imitating scientific objectivity, speaks contemptuously of the “pathetic fallacy” that sentimentally attributes human qualities to an object, as when a writer speaks of the “cruel, crawling foam” of the tide. But such a criticism is valid only within the conventions of realism. Something like the psychological phenomenology of Gaston Bachelard, whose books bear titles such as The Psychoanalysis of Fire and The Poetics of Space, is more adequate to the whole of literature and mythology.
Winter as an inward condition is coldness, the lack of love, ultimately the lack of feeling altogether, a numbness of the soul. Popular conventions of fire and brimstone notwithstanding, the lower circles of Dante’s hell are progressively dominated by cold and ice to signify that the real meaning of damnation is lack of love. In “Frost and Fire,” Frost associates ice with hate, the kind which is not hot and passionate but inhumanly cold. In Shakespeare’s As You Like It, naïve attempts to live a pastoral existence run up against both the cold of a real, very unliterary English winter and the coldness of human nature. One of its songs says, “Blow, blow, thou winter wind, / Thou art not so unkind / As man’s ingratitude.” Its refrain runs, “Most friendship is feigning, most Loving mere folly.”
Love is connection: lack of love is, or leads to, alienation and isolation. The souls in the lowest circle of Dante’s hell are in an eternal solitary confinement. At the very bottom they are totally frozen into the ice, “like straws in glass.” Solitary alienation may be the result of a moral failing, but, in other works of literature, it may be simply the human condition. This is true in a number of winter poems by Robert Frost, who seems to have been determined to live up to his name. “An Old Man’s Winter Night” claims that “One aged man—one man—can’t keep a house /
A farm, a countryside,” but shows an old man doing it anyway, although “A light he was to no one but himself / Where now he sat, concerned with who knows what.” “Desert Places” begins with “Snow falling and night falling fast,” and ends with one of the great statements of winter as an inward condition:
And lonely as it is, that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less—
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express.
They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between starts—stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.
His Fortress of Solitude in the Arctic tells us that Superman, the noblest of the superheroes, is also the loneliest—perhaps because he is the noblest.
Northrop Frye’s writing on early Canadian literature has always drawn me because of its description of a small, isolated colonial population surrounded by a winter landscape on a vast scale: “Still, the winter, with its long shadows and its abstract black and white pattern, does reinforce themes of desolation and loneliness, and, more particularly, of the indifference of nature to human values, which I should say was the central Canadian tragic theme” (263). He praises one of the colonial poets, Bliss Carman, for not living up to his name (“happy song”), at least in his greatest poems: “And while his conscious mind called for songs of the open road and getting in tune with the infinite, his real poetic imagination became increasingly brooding, lonely, and haunted:
The windows of my room
Are dark with bitter frost,
The stillness aches with doom
Of something loved and lost.
Outside, the great blue star
Burns in the ghostland pale,
Where giant Algebar
Holds on the endless trail” (127)
The essence of winter is cold, and what is cold? An absence, as we signify by our thermometers that go down to zero, an absence of heat energy, and therefore an absence of movement. At absolute zero, things stop moving altogether. The phrase “heat death of the universe” means the death of heat due to the triumph of entropy. Whatever Frost had in mind when he said some claim the world will end in ice, back when the apocalypse du jour was nuclear war rather than global warming, Carl Sagan warned that such a war would produce “nuclear winter.” We would bomb ourselves back to the Stone Age—but the Stone Age was an Ice Age, which is perhaps what Aldiss and Martin were really imagining. Perhaps the long winter out of which the human race emerged will return upon us in the end.
And yet, we did emerge out of the Pleistocene deep freeze, a miracle to which we have perhaps not paid sufficient attention—a miracle that the animals repeat every winter. No matter how harsh the winter here in North Royalton, the animals return every spring. How do they possibly survive? The biologist Bernd Heinrich has explored that question in a fascinating book, Winter World: The Ingenuity of Animal Survival (2003). Mice can actually tunnel under the snow. Not everything excavated from eternal ice is necessarily monstrous. In Iceman, a thoughtful though forgotten film from 1984, Australian filmmaker Fred Shepisi imagined the revival of a Neanderthal discovered in glacial ice, and, startlingly, in 2019 the German director Felix Randau released another film of the same name, based on the 1991 discovery of an actual Neolithic man preserved in a glacier, now preserved in a museum in Bolzano, the Alpine region of northern Italy that my family comes from (and which may have given us our family name). This one has not come back to life, not yet anyway, but our imaginations are spellbound by the possibility.
The imagination thrives on impossible possibilities because all life is an impossible possibility, a miracle that should not be, and yet is. In the beginning, there was Nothing. Then a “singularity” appeared for no reason the scientists have got remotely close to discovering: a spark that exploded into light, heat, energy in all directions, galaxies upon galaxies. Where did the spark of Creation come from? The traditional answer is, from above, as Milton shows in the Nativity Ode: at Christmas, nature waits buried in snow, a power descends and, for a moment, the world is on the verge of returning to the moment of the original Creation, or to the Golden Age. In Sydney Carter’s folk song “The Bells of Norwich,” “Love, like the yellow daffodil is coming through the snow, / Love, like the yellow daffodil is Lord of all I know,” leading to the chorus line quoting the English mystic Julian of Norwich, “All shall be well again I know.”
From the Romantic age forward, however, a mysterious creative power has more often been seen ascending from below or from within, including within the human heart in the form of love. Keats’s The Eve of St. Agnes is organized according to the Eros colors of red and white, where red is the vital power of human love. The hero’s name is Porphyro, after porphyry, a red or purple stone. St. Agnes’ Eve is January 20, and the night is “bitter chill”: “The hare limped trembling through the frozen grass” (l. 3). The white of winter snow is linked with the sterile Christianity of a “Bedesman” telling his rosary with “frosted breath” (l. 6). But St. Agnes herself represents a different kind of religion: a kind of spiritual matchmaker, she gives young women dreams of their true loves on the eve of her feast. Porphyro sneaks into the bedroom of the sleeping Madeline, and, while she sleeps, sets before her bed a feast that continues the color scheme of red and white:
a heap
Of candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd;
With jellies soother than the creamy curd,
and lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon;
Manna and dates… (l. 264-68)
What in the world does this fellow think he is doing? Ah, but what do I know? I still remember the praise in a female student’s essay many years ago, giving Porphyro enthusiastic credit for knowing the real way to a woman’s heart. We note that the feast is largely fruit, and Porphyro himself is figuratively forbidden fruit. It has its effect: Madeline wakes up, sees the food, sees Porphyry, and away they run: “These lovers fled away into the storm” (l. 371), escaping Madeline’s hostile family. Keats clearly intends an allusion to Paradise Lost, in which Adam dreams of his intended mate and awakes to find Eve standing before him. In a famous passage of his letters, Keats says that the imagination is like Adam’s dream: he wakes to find it true.
In a very different way, the escape of two lovers fleeing social hostility across a hostile alien landscape of brutal cold and ice is also the plot of Ursula LeGuin’s distinguished science fiction novel The Left Hand of Darkness, with the twist that one of the lovers is an alien who changes genders, becomes male or female as the situation demands. But the triumph of love against both social and natural coldness is the same.
Dylan Thomas’s “A Winter’s Tale” has probably been influenced by Milton, Keats, and Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale all at once. In a winter landscape, “By the spit and the black pot in the log bright light” a man prays desperately for love, and his wish is granted. A fiery “she bird” appears, “her breast with snow and scarlet downed.” As at the appearance of Christ in Milton’s Nativity Ode, death comes alive: “Horses, centaur dead, turn and tread…/ The dead oak walks for love.” At the poem’s climax, in all senses, she rises with him
Burning in the bride bed of love, in the whirl-
Pool at the wanting centre, in the folds
Of paradise, in the spun bud of the world.
It always seems to be winter when the impossible possibility happens. Why this should be is a mystery. It does not matter whether the power that turns winter into spring, the Fall into paradise, comes from above or below. It does not matter whether we call it grace, love, or imagination. What matters is the hope that it happens, whether in the folktale past of a “winter’s tale,” in the bitter realism of the present moment, or, as with the man, at the moment of death. What we need in the English language is a verb tense that indicates “all of the above.”
Reference
Frye, Northrop. Northrop Frye on Canada, edited by Jean O’Grady and David Staines, volume 12 of The Collected Works of Northrop Frye, University of Toronto Press, 2003.