… by Minna Thomas Antrim.
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Brew me a cup for a winter’s night.
For the wind howls loud and the furies fight;
Spice it with love and stir it with care,
And I’ll toast our bright eyes, my sweetheart fair.
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UD‘s been handed many cups of mulled cider over the last few days. She likes to see the cloves in the cup, likes to blow on the cider and sip around the cloves and allspice and cinnamon.
The wee verse is charming, but we want something more substantial to mull.
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“It was beginning winter”
It was beginning winter,
An in-between time,
The landscape still partly brown:
The bones of weeds kept swinging in the wind,
Above the blue snow.
[Roethke lends a lento, medieval feel to his poem with his simple chant, his retrospection… There’s also a bit of a ghouly feel, with those dead bones in the blue snow still weirdly swinging. Which will introduce his theme – what is the nature of life in the midst of death? What persists? As in Eliot’s Waste Land: What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow / Out of this stony rubbish?]
It was beginning winter,
The light moved slowly over the frozen field,
Over the dry seed-crowns,
The beautiful surviving bones
Swinging in the wind.
[Philip Larkin’s An Arundel Tomb has this beautiful line, evoking the passage of time amid the stillness of an ancient tomb inside of a church: Light / Each summer thronged the glass.
Trying to evoke the same sense of life, movement, amid a larger immobility, Roethke has the light moving slowly over the unmoving field – a residue of vivacity, a messenger from a more living place. ‘Seed-crowns’ deepens the sense of antiquity.]
Light traveled over the wide field;
Stayed.
The weeds stopped swinging.
The mind moved, not alone,
Through the clear air, in the silence.
[One must have a mind of winter, writes Wallace Stevens in a more famous poem, also mulling the thought that thought itself is the living thing that not only persists but thrives in wintry conditions: The mind of winter must remake the world, reanimate with memory and longing a living world. The silence of the winter world makes room for the mind, undistracts the mind from the busyness of rich natural life, and rivets it on the essentials.]
Was it light?
Was it light within?
Was it light within light?
Stillness becoming alive,
Yet still?
[And so the poet now freely muses, his mind released from the physical life of warm seasons into the philosophical disposition of winter. What is life? What is the life that continues even in the dead of winter? Is it merely the light of my mind casting light over the world? Or is there another source?]
A lively understandable spirit
Once entertained you.
It will come again.
Be still.
Wait.
[Who knows? These bright, glacial mysteries are beyond me. Best merely to sit tight and wait for the spring, when the world will become comprehensible again.]