Winter is a-coming in, so how about some poetry to reflect the season of cold frosts and snowy landscapes? Whether it’s falling snow or cold evenings, poets have often been drawn to the wintry season. Here are ten of the best winter poems, from Thomas Hardy’s New Year meditation to Christina Rossetti’s classic Christmas carol. As you might expect, snow features heavily in many of these poems. What do you think is the best poem about winter? Any suggestions?

Winter illustration wall sticker

Thomas Hardy, ‘The Darkling Thrush‘. Composed on the last day of 1900 – and also, therefore, on the final day of the nineteenth century (if you follow the convention that the twentieth century began in 1901, that is) – ‘The Darkling Thrush’ takes a single frost-ridden scene, a moment of wintry wonder, and meditates upon its meaning. Here, Thomas Hardy sounds his characteristic note of ‘unhope’: the speaker wants to share the hope he detects in the thrush’s ‘full-hearted evensong’, but – much like the speaker of Hardy’s Christmas poem, ‘The Oxen’ – he cannot quite find it in his heart to be optimistic.

Snowflake

Louis MacNeice, ‘Snow‘. This short poem from one of the ‘pylon poets’ takes an altogether more traditional subject: the snow falling outside. Worth reading for the astonishing language-use in the fourth line alone: ‘World is sudden than we fancy it.’

Emily Dickinson, ‘It sifts from leaden sieves‘. A beautiful description of the way snow obscures familiar objects, rendering them strange and ghostly to us. Who but Dickinson would have thought to describe snow as ‘alabaster wool’?

Christmas Snowflakes

Philip Larkin, ‘First Sight‘. This short lyric from Britain’s best-loved lugubrious poet is about lambs taking their first steps in the snow, unaware of the ‘immeasurable surprise’ that nature has in store for them – such as the bright brilliance, sunshine, and flowering of spring. 

Christina Rossetti, ‘In the Bleak Midwinter‘. We also include this in our pick of the best Christmas poems, but it’s also a classic winter poem so it earns its place on this list as well. ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’ was actually first published under the title ‘A Christmas Carol’, but it has since become known by its first line, especially after the popularity of several musical settings of the poem.

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William Shakespeare, Sonnet 97. This sonnet from William Shakespeare uses winter imagery to describe the Winter scene to speaker’s absence from his lover. The poem goes on to bring in other seasons – notably autumn – but in the final line winter returns, so we’d say this qualifies as a great winter poem.

Sylvia Plath, ‘Waking in Winter‘. A slightly different kind of ‘winter’, this: a nuclear winter. Written in 1960 and infused with Cold War and environmentalist elements, ‘Waking in Winter’ offers a bleak vision of a post-nuclear winter where the sky doesn’t just look like tin – the whole atmosphere tastes metallic, too. ‘Waking in Winter’ examines the bleakness of a winter created by man rather than nature – of ‘destructions, annihilations’.

Snowflake sticker

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