arts

Poem Of The Week: A Winter Night By William Barnes (1801-1886)

A Winter Night

It was a chilly winter's night;
And frost was glittering on the ground,
And evening stars were twinkling bright;
And from the gloomy plain around
Came no sound,
But where, within the wood-girt tow'r,
The churchbell slowly struck the hour;

As if that all of human birth
Had risen to the final day,
And soaring from the worn-out earth
Were called in hurry and dismay,
Far away ;
And I alone of all mankind
Were left in loneliness behind.

Image by Holly Sopp on Unsplash

The toll of William Barnes’ bell is measured, like Cowper’s churchyard elegy, in languorous iambics and solid rhymes, whose presence sets the mood and tone of his poem. The chilly and peaceful scene ushers in a winter we might only dream of in these dank, dripping days; until the sepulchral silence is suddenly animated by an expectant taking of breath in ‘Came no sound’, and the spell is broken by the bell’s hourly announcement.

In the second stanza the forces of suggestion occupy an otherwise empty landscape, where the risen dead, called by the other-worldly somnolence of the toll, assemble ‘Far away’ like hesitant apparitions, leaving the narrator and his strange narrative to the dark illusion of abandonment and isolation.

‘A Winter Night’ is taken from The New Oxford Book of English Verse 1250-1950, published by Oxford University Press (1972)

Also by Steve Whitaker...

Children's Poem Of The Week: Dance Of The Stream Sprite by Jacqueline Shirtliff

Poem Of The Week: Gaza By Bill Manhire

Poem Of The Week: The Only English Kid By Hannah Lowe

Poem Of The Week: Ends By Matthew Sweeney (1952-2018)

Children's Book Review: Siri Nosbig And The Noisy Campers By Sally Brown, Illustrated By Susan Wood

	Sunrise	6:26AM
Sunset	6:13PM