Apparently this poem by Rosssetti and set to music by Holst, was voted the United Kingdom’s favourite carol . Today, walking my two dogs around a deserted park, I found myself singing the haunting words, aware of earth’s shut down, aware too of the pleasure felt because of the harshness, the irrelevance of man’s desperate will to power.
The language of the first verse/stanza quietly retrieves language from the silence of solitude and wintry weather. How many winters has this poem borne witness to? Each winter involving carol singers with their own private concerns and prayers.
Little wonder that the poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, seems fond of images similar to those found in Rossetti’s famous poem. The icy, bleak stoniness of poems like Demeter, Medusa and Mrs Lazarus in particular, reveal the abject grief of loss and the desolate waiting that comes before any possibility of rebirth, release or even resurrection.
Duffy too, has suggested that many of her poems are like prayers. They give pause to contemplation, a space away from the sometimes madding crowd of worldly preoccupations. Looking at Rosssetti’s poem, I am aware of her representation of space, intimate and sweepingly transcendent and of my breathing as I read the poem aloud.
For this is a prayer. It seems a meditation on winter as the earth’s end; a quiet testament to the season’s repetition and ancestry. The individual egotistical self has become subsumed by universal continuity. The sounds, echoic with assonance, transport us back, back deep into the muffled landscapes of the past. Sing this in an old church and find yourself lost in memories that are most likely no longer, if ever, your own. The images too seem archetypal, monuments of the ancients; our worldly survival but brief against the passage of time. Our cares gently buried under the snow.
And God is truly all powerful, sweeping away constraints with his promised second coming, more terrifying and uncompromising than the humility and poverty of the first. So we take refuge in this bleak midwinter. Its details and picture are our safe companions through our brief sojourn here.
The carol gives us the gift of simplicity and acceptance. A rediscovery of cyclical time and accord.
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.
2. Our God, heaven cannot hold him, nor earth sustain;
heaven and earth shall flee away when he comes to reign.
In the bleak midwinter a stable place sufficed
the Lord God Almighty, Jesus Christ.
3. Angels and archangels may have gathered there,
cherubim and seraphim thronged the air;
but his mother only, in her maiden bliss,
worshiped the beloved with a kiss.
4. What can I give him, poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb;
if I were a Wise Man, I would do my part;
yet what I can I give him: give my heart.