It’s turned so cold that what we would normally expect in January seems to have arrived a bit early.
It has put me in mind of this 1938 poem by W H Auden. There are lots of poems about snow but fewer about winter. This one captures very well that sense of dislocation and transformation that the freezing weather brings, but winter here is a political metaphor as well.
As so often with Auden, who was writing about the 1930s, one feels that nothing has really changed, or that history is repeating itself.
I love that line near the end, “A phrase goes packed with meaning like a van”. It describes not only what this poem does, with its intensity and compression of language, but what poetry in general does, I think.
Brussels in Winter by W H Auden
Wandering through cold streets tangled like old string,
Coming on fountains rigid in the frost,
Its formula escapes you; it has lost
The certainty that constitutes a thing.
Only the old, the hungry and the humbled
Keep at this temperature a sense of place,
And in their misery are all assembled;
The winter holds them like an Opera-House.
Ridges of rich apartments loom to-night
Where isolated windows glow like farms,
A phrase goes packed with meaning like a van,
A look contains the history of man,
And fifty francs will earn a stranger right
To take the shuddering city in his arms.
The Good Reader 