In the Bleak Midwinter

In the Bleakmidwinter

Frosty wind made moan,

Earth stood hard as iron,

Water like a stone;

Snow had fallen, snow on snow,

Snow on snow,

In the bleak midwinter,

Long Ago.

Christina Rossetti

music by Gustav Holst

The Snow-drop,

Winter's timid child,

Awakes to life,

bedew'd with tears

Mary Robinson

Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,

Arrives the snow, and, driving o'er the fields,

Seems nowhere to alight: the withered air

Hides hills and woods, the river, and the heaven,

And veils the farm-house at the garden's end.

The sled and traveller stopped, the courier's feet

Delayed, all friends shut out, and housemates sit

Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed

In a tumultuous privacy of storm

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure

in the landscape - the loneliness of it - the dead feeling of

winter.  Something waits beneath it - the whole story

doesn't show.

Andrew Wyeth

Most people, early in November, take last looks at their

gardens, and are then prepared to ignore them until the spring. 

I am quite sure that a garden doesn't like to be

ignored like this.

It doesn't like to be covered in dust sheets, as though it were

an old room which you had shut up during the winter.

Especially since a garden knows how gay and delightful

it can be,

even in the very frozen heart of the winter,

if you only give it a chance.

Beverley Nichols

There is a privacy about it which no other season gives you ...

In Spring, Summer and Fall people sort of have an

open season on each other;

only in winter, in the country,

can you have longer, quiet stretches when you can

savour belonging to yourself.

Ruth Stout

When the ice of winter holds the house in its rigid grip,

when curtains are drawn early against that vast frozen waste

of landscape,

almost like a hibernating hedgehog

I relish the security of being withdrawn from all that summer

ferment that is long since past.

Then is the time for re-appraisal: to spread out,

limp and receptive,

and let garden thoughts rise to the surface.

They emerge from some deep source of stillness

which the very fact of winter

has released.
Mirabel Osler

All photos: Pinterest