TO WINTER by William Blake

 

 

“O Winter! bat thine adamantine doors:

The north is thine!; there hast thou built thy dark

Deep-founded habitation. Shake not thy roofs,

Nor bend thy pillars with thine iron car ".

 

He hears me not, but o'er the yawning deep

Rides heavy,- his storms are unchain'd, sheated

In ribbedsteal; I dare no lift mine eyes

For he hath rear'd his screpte o’er the world.

 

Lo! Now the direful, whose skin clings.

To his strong bones, strides o’er the groaning rocks:

He withers all in silence, and his hand

Unclothes the earth, and freezes up frail life.

 

He takes his seat upon the cliffs,- the mariner

Cries in vain. Poor little wretch, that deal'st

With storms!- till heaven smiles, and the monster

Is driv'n yelling to his caves beneath Mount Hecla.

 

(W. Blake. "Selected Poetry”)

 

 

 

 

The first verse begins referring to winter, as the title of the poem. The winter pours out  from the north, where darkness has been built. “there hast thou built thy dark”. Darkness is the element which predominates in the room or habitation as William Blake calls it. We can observe here the relation between winter and  darkness,  elements which connote sadness.

 

William Blake carries on describing the effects of the winter. Through his description we perceive winter as something terrible, devastating, something that has infinite force. Definitively a phenomenon which can destroy everything that finds.

 

If we take in to account the description of winter, we can imagine the author live somewhere in the north, where the weather is very cold.

         

In the second verse the author uses expressions which transmit fear, terror even horror as “riding heavy” “unchain’d sheated” storm. Winter is compared to steal, hard and strong. In other words, winter is characterized as an angry uncontrolled monster able to destroy everything. Here, even the author confesses he is unable to look at it. William Blake presents the winter as an immense force able to dominate the world.

 

In the third verse winter is described as a “direful monster”, that is to say, a terrible monster. By referring to its strong bones, Blake pretends to emphasise and to remind us winter’s force and destructive effect. The author says that even rocks groan because of the pain it makes them feel. By this personification we can understand that winter possesses so much destructive power, it can make so much pain that even a rock can feel it. The winter leaves everything in silence, dead. The winter unclothes the earth and by the freeze the winter kills most of the living beings. A place without flowers or vegetation inspires sadness, unhappiness.

 

 

In the forth and last verse, Blake explains that the winter is sitting on a cliff while the mariner cries in vain. The storm sent by the winter is driving him to his caves.  By saying “his” caves, the author is emphasising that the caves belong to winter, that’s to say to the monster, to something evil, wicked. We can know by intuition that the mariner is going to have a bad ending, we can even think that he is going to die in “his caves”.

 

Along the entire poem William Blake personifies “the winter” by referring to it as “he” instead of “it” and by using the possessive “his” as in “his strong bones”. The effect Blake gets by personifying the winter is to give it more importance and to make us feel it very close to us.

 

 

Bibliography

 

-         English romantic poets: modern essays in criticism. Edited by. Abrams M.H. London, Oxford University Press, 1975.

 

-         Selected poetry / William Blake; edited with an introduction and notes by Michael Mason. Oxford.  Oxford University Press, 1998