Edwin Morgan - Winter

The year goes, the woods decay, and after,
many a summer dies. The swan
on Bingham’s pond, a ghost, comes and goes.
It goes, and ice appears, it holds,
bears gulls that stand around surprised,
blinking in the heavy light, bears boys
when skates take over, the swan-white ice
glints only crystal beyond white. Even
dearest blue’s not there, though poets would find it.
I find one stark scene
cut by evening cries, by warring air.
The muffled hiss of blades escapes into breath,
hangs with it a moment, fades off.
Fades off, goes, the scene, the voices fade,
the line of trees, the woods that fall, decay
and break, the dark comes down, the shouts
run off into it and disappear.
At last the lamps go too, when fog
drives monstrous down the dual carriageway
out to the west, and even in my room
and on this paper I do not know
about that grey dead pane
of ice that sees nothing and that nothing sees.

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I talk a lot about pacing in these write-ups, but I imagine sometimes it can be difficult to know exactly what I mean. So I decided to read this one aloud, partially because it is a great example of how word choice dictates pacing and partially because it is just fun to read.

Let’s set a base level of understanding here: a novel is a movie, a short story is an episode of television, a vignette is a 30-second video clip from your phone and a poem is a photograph. I know epic poems exist. I know some monstrous pieces might escape the boundaries I’m placing here, but do me a favor and just rock with me for a while. A poem, especially one like this, is a snapshot of feeling.

On the simplest level, this is a poem about the ice of winter. It ends with the admission “on this paper I do not know/ about that grey dead pane”. But this is also a poem about finality. Go back and check out how much Morgan references death. The poem is full of death, decay, darkness, war, blades, fading everything, trees falling, lights going out, fog swallowing everything.

Halfway through Morgan muses that there is no blue — neither sky nor water — but a poet would find it. Poets are the hopeful lot, right? He follows that with a comical contradiction where the speaker of this particular poem finds nothing but the cries of death: “I find one stark scene/ cut by evening cries”.

This could be pretty depressing but the pacing and the language choices prevent it from being heavy and overwhelming. Playful bits like “heavy light” or the swan returning through its color lent to the ice as if it transformed into the ice itself. As if the death that the ice represents is something tangible built from our characteristics and therefore indicative of the hopefulness that we continue after this life.

Or maybe the rolling sounds of goes, ghost, goes, holds, gulls offset by the sharp sounds of dies, ice, surprised, light, white ice, find, cries work their way into the parts of our brains that find magic in songs. Lyrical poetry didn’t die, it just married instrumentals and bore the offspring of music. When a poem creates that music on its own, it hits differently. That’s exactly what Morgan did with this piece. He pruned and posed something that would otherwise be awful until he found the blue that only a poet could find. The blue wasn’t in the content, it was the poem itself.