This week’s choice is Winter by E. Nesbit which carries a double meaning.
Hold your hands to the blaze;
E. Nesbit (1858—1924)
Winter is here
With the short cold days,
Bleak, keen and drear.
Poem 424. Winter
Hold your hands to the blaze;
Winter is here
With the short cold days,
Bleak, keen and drear.
Was there ever a day
With hawthorn along the way
Where you wandered in mild mid-May
With your dear?
That was when you were young
And the world was gold;
Now all the songs are sung,
The tales all told.
You shiver now by the fire
Where the last red sparks expire;
Dead are delight and desire:
You are old.
Edith Nesbit is best known for her children’s stories: Five Children and It, the Bastable novels, and The Railway Children, but she also wrote poetry and ghost stories including Man Size in Marble which was adapted by Mark Gatiss as Woman of Stone, the BBC’s Ghost Story for Christmas in 2024.
This poem seems to describe the dark days of winter but it is a metaphor for old age and the desolation it may bring.
We begin with someone warming their hands at the fireside just as anyone might after going outside in the cold of winter, commenting on the shortness of the days and the bleakness of the world and wondering that there was ever a “mild mid-May” when they were warm and loved. The metaphor becomes more distinct and we can also read the stanza as a comment on the propensity of the old to feel chilled even by a roaring fire and to believe that every day is dark and drab compared to the golden age of their younger days.
To the aged nothing seems to be new: “all the songs are sung,/The tales all told” and cold draughts chill their ancient frames both directly and by extinguishing the fire. Like the fire, the old joie de vivre is breathing its last—“Dead are delight and desire”—and the awareness of their extreme age arrives.
Although the poem is rather depressing, I admire Nesbit’s use of the winter as a metaphor for old age, with the long nights prompting a nostalgia for warm summer days that isn’t just the province of pensioners.
There is one performance of the poem by Ghizela Rowe on YouTube’s Edith Nesbit — Topic channel.