Winter Poems | Great Winter Poems Everyone Should Read

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    A Glimpse Poem by Walt Whitman

    A GLIMPSE, through an interstice caught,
    Of a crowd of workmen and drivers in a bar-room, around the stove,
    late of a winter night–And I unremark’d seated in a corner;
    Of a youth who loves me, and whom I love, silently approaching, and
    seating himself near, that he may hold me by the hand;
    A long while, amid the noises of coming and going–of drinking and
    oath and smutty jest,
    There we two, content, happy in being together, speaking little,
    perhaps not a word.

     

     

    A Madrigal Poem by William Shakespeare

    Crabbed Age and Youth
    Cannot live together:
    Youth is full of pleasance,
    Age is full of care;
    Youth like summer morn,
    Age like winter weather;
    Youth like summer brave,
    Age like winter bare:
    Youth is full of sports,
    Age’s breath is short,
    Youth is nimble, Age is lame:
    Youth is hot and bold,
    Age is weak and cold,
    Youth is wild, and Age is tame:-
    Age, I do abhor thee;
    Youth, I do adore thee;
    O! my Love, my Love is young!
    Age, I do defy thee-
    O sweet shepherd, hie thee,
    For methinks thou stay’st too long.

     

     

    A Lament Poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley

    O World! O Life! O Time!
    On whose last steps I climb,
    Trembling at that where I had stood before;
    When will return the glory of your prime?
    No more -Oh, never more!

    Out of the day and night
    A joy has taken flight:
    Fresh spring, and summer, and winter hoar
    Move my faint heart with grief, but with delight
    No more -Oh, never more!

     

     

    Name Of Horses Poem by Donald Hall

    All winter your brute shoulders strained against collars, padding
    and steerhide over the ash hames, to haul
    sledges of cordwood for drying through spring and summer,
    for the Glenwood stove next winter, and for the simmering range.

    In April you pulled cartloads of manure to spread on the fields,
    dark manure of Holsteins, and knobs of your own clustered with oats.
    All summer you mowed the grass in meadow and hayfield, the mowing machine
    clacketing beside you, while the sun walked high in the morning;

    and after noon’s heat, you pulled a clawed rake through the same acres,
    gathering stacks, and dragged the wagon from stack to stack,
    and the built hayrack back, uphill to the chaffy barn,
    three loads of hay a day from standing grass in the morning.

    Sundays you trotted the two miles to church with the light load
    a leather quartertop buggy, and grazed in the sound of hymns.
    Generation on generation, your neck rubbed the windowsill
    of the stall, smoothing the wood as the sea smooths glass.

    When you were old and lame, when your shoulders hurt bending to graze,
    one October the man, who fed you and kept you, and harnessed you every morning,
    led you through corn stubble to sandy ground above Eagle Pond,
    and dug a hole beside you where you stood shuddering in your skin,

    and lay the shotgun’s muzzle in the boneless hollow behind your ear,
    and fired the slug into your brain, and felled you into your grave,
    shoveling sand to cover you, setting goldenrod upright above you,
    where by next summer a dent in the ground made your monument.

    For a hundred and fifty years, in the Pasture of dead horses,
    roots of pine trees pushed through the pale curves of your ribs,
    yellow blossoms flourished above you in autumn, and in winter
    frost heaved your bones in the ground – old toilers, soil makers:

    O Roger, Mackerel, Riley, Ned, Nellie, Chester, Lady Ghost.

     

     

    Ancient Music Poem by Ezra Pound

    Winter is icummen in,
    Lhude sing Goddamm.
    Raineth drop and staineth slop,
    And how the wind doth ramm!
    Sing: Goddamm.

    Skiddeth bus and sloppeth us,
    An ague hath my ham.
    Freezeth river, turneth liver,
    Damn you, sing: Goddamm.

    Goddamm, Goddamm, ’tis why I am, Goddamm,
    So ‘gainst the winter’s balm.

    Sing goddamm, damm, sing Goddamm.
    Sing goddamm, sing goddamm, DAMM.

     

     

    Celebrate Poem by Anna Akhmatova

    Celebrate our anniversary – can’t you see
    tonight the snowy night of our first winter
    comes back again in every road and tree –
    that winter night of diamantine splendour.

    Steam is pouring out of yellow stables,
    the Moika river’s sinking under snow,
    the moonlight’s misted as it is in fables,
    and where we are heading – I don’t know.

    There are icebergs on the Marsovo Pole.
    The Lebyazh’ya’s crazed with crystal art…..
    Whose soul can compare with my soul,
    if joy and fear are in my heart? –

    And if your voice, a marvellous bird’s,
    quivers at my shoulder, in the night,
    and the snow shines with a silver light,
    warmed by a sudden ray, by your words?

     

     

    Under The Greenwood Tree Poem by William Shakespeare

    Under the greenwood tree
    Who loves to lie with me,
    And turn his merry note
    Unto the sweet bird’s throat,
    Come hither, come hither, come hither:
    Here shall he see
    No enemy
    But winter and rough weather.

    Who doth ambition shun,
    And loves to live i’ the sun,
    Seeking the food he eats,
    And pleas’d with what he gets,
    Come hither, come hither, come hither:
    Here shall he see
    No enemy
    But winter and rough weather.

     

     

    A Calendar Of Sonnets: January Poem by Helen Hunt Jackson

    O Winter! frozen pulse and heart of fire,
    What loss is theirs who from thy kingdom turn
    Dismayed, and think thy snow a sculptured urn
    Of death! Far sooner in midsummer tire
    The streams than under ice. June could not hire
    Her roses to forego the strength they learn
    In sleeping on thy breast. No fires can burn
    The bridges thou dost lay where men desire
    In vain to build.
    O Heart, when Love’s sun goes
    To northward, and the sounds of singing cease,
    Keep warm by inner fires, and rest in peace.
    Sleep on content, as sleeps the patient rose.
    Walk boldly on the white untrodden snows,
    The winter is the winter’s own release.

     

     

    Winter Memories Poem by Henry David Thoreau

    Within the circuit of this plodding life
    There enter moments of an azure hue,
    Untarnished fair as is the violet
    Or anemone, when the spring stew them
    By some meandering rivulet, which make
    The best philosophy untrue that aims
    But to console man for his grievences.
    I have remembered when the winter came,
    High in my chamber in the frosty nights,
    When in the still light of the cheerful moon,
    On the every twig and rail and jutting spout,
    The icy spears were adding to their length
    Against the arrows of the coming sun,
    How in the shimmering noon of winter past
    Some unrecorded beam slanted across
    The upland pastures where the Johnwort grew;
    Or heard, amid the verdure of my mind,
    The bee’s long smothered hum, on the blue flag
    Loitering amidst the mead; or busy rill,
    Which now through all its course stands still and dumb
    Its own memorial, – purling at its play
    Along the slopes, and through the meadows next,
    Until its youthful sound was hushed at last
    In the staid current of the lowland stream;
    Or seen the furrows shine but late upturned,
    And where the fieldfare followed in the rear,
    When all the fields around lay bound and hoar
    Beneath a thick integument of snow.
    So by God’s cheap economy made rich
    To go upon my winter’s task again.

     

     

    Alone Poem by Walter de la Mare

    The abode of the nightingale is bare,
    Flowered frost congeals in the gelid air,
    The fox howls from his frozen lair:
    Alas, my loved one is gone,
    I am alone:
    It is winter.

    Once the pink cast a winy smell,
    The wild bee hung in the hyacinth bell,
    Light in effulgence of beauty fell:
    I am alone:
    It is winter.

    My candle a silent fire doth shed,
    Starry Orion hunts o’erhead;
    Come moth, come shadow, the world is dead:
    Alas, my loved one is gone,
    I am alone;
    It is winter.