More often than I like, once the sun starts setting so early it would be unseemly for a glass of merlot and the evening still stretches long and I lack the will for the labor-laden tasks that lie ahead, Christina Rossetti's words come to mind:
In the bleak midwinter, 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 midwinter, long ago.
Sure, those are the words of a beautiful hymn. Music by Gustave Holst. And by the end it's a happy-enough song, with the speaker of the words figuring out that in order to honor the baby Jesus all she (or he) needs to do is give her heart.
That said, I don't much like the end of the hymn and Rossetti's words. It's too easy, all that "give your heart" nonsense. It seems to me that anybody who can proffer such vapid advice has never suffered heartache.
Besides, the "earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone" part makes a lot more sense to anybody living in the Northeast. We know what it means that snow has fallen, "snow on snow, snow on snow"—and as I write this is still falling. Robert Frost could have penned that line and maybe should have, if Christina Rossetti, Pre-Raphaelite poet and doyenne, hadn't written it first.
Winter — and early winter most especially — is a hard time. Each year it jolts the system. I'm of Scandinavian ancestry, so I always try to convince myself I should be genetically suited to withstand the cold and sudden darkness. But perhaps there was a Mediterranean lover spliced somewhere onto the family tree and I have inherited from him an untoward love of sunshine (and olives, wine and basil), because I feel cold deep into the bone, particularly during these early punishing weeks of drear grey and drying chill.
Surely, this was what I felt as I walked my dog — yes, a new dog, my first dog, a black lab, shiny-coated lab, rescued from a kill-shelter in Kentucky — in the gibbous-mooned darkness of the bitter cold night. I felt that Frostian displacement, that out-of-sorts anger spiraling out into the world. Didn't I?
Yes, I did. Because surely I wanted the dog to do his business, with prompt immediacy. Also I wanted my car battery to last the night (as it had not done the previous night). To my laundry list of in-house desires, I wanted to go inside where I could draw a hot bath and then sit in that bath, a glass of Cote du Rhone — emphasis on "Rhone," that languid river that opens into a balmy Mediterranean delta — on the tub-side table.
So why, at the same time, did I also feel a kind of somnolent need to linger alone in the darkness?
I let the dog have his leash. There was more for him to seek, snow drifts to encounter, mini-glacial cirques to fit his snout into and sniff. I wasn't going anywhere. Not for an extra moment or two.
Shivering — and hating the shivering and my runny nose and my numbing thumbs — I became aware that during this simultaneously party-and-colored-lights-filled season, I find I seek out the solitude, the focus of the single candle, the quiet walk in the cold streets, the silent sitting in front of the Christmas tree.
It's there, alone on the couch, not unhappily, that I come back not to Christina Rossetti, not to Robert Frost, but to Wallace Stevens, a poet I don't even like, whose words, paraphrased, do ground me: One must have a mind of winter, and have been cold a long time to behold the nothing that is not there. And the nothing that is.
Amen to that, I want to say. Amen.
Jo Page's email address is jopage34@yahoo.com. Her website is at >www.jo-page.com>.