Originally presented at the Wright Chapel at the Lakewood Presbyterian Church

“Thy breath be rude,” William Shakespeare famously told winter in “As You Like It,” invoking a common complaint about the season: winter is cold, windy, bleak, awful. Five centuries later, poets have much the same complaints.

Winter’s metaphors often include its stillness, its sense of silence and darkness, a season of hibernation, a season where everything dies a little. The falling snow is a “poem of the air,” wrote Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, where the “troubled sky reveals the grief it feels.”

Although the long, freezing winter nights and the crisp winter days tend to inspire harsh feelings among the people who endure them, not all poets see winter as a bleak and lifeless season. In Robert Frost’s “Dust of Snow,” a crow’s movements cause snow to dust the speaker passing under a tree, and this dust “Has given my heart / A change of mood / And saved some part / Of a day I had rued.” For other poets, the severe winter weather is a chance to speak in defiance of nature.

Winter weather also provides many poets with an excuse to turn away from outdoor pastimes and instead to concentrate on renewing and affirming their human relationships. The poem “Now winter nights enlarge” by Thomas Campion, for example, celebrates human warmth amidst chilly weather.

Many poets see winter as a fact of the landscape they call home, infusing it with nostalgia. Still others celebrate winter and the joys of the holidays and good cheer it brings.

WordStage’s “WinterWords”  is a pastiche of all these and more by some of our greatest poets and storytellers: from Robert Frost,  Thomas Hardy, the Emilys Bronte and Dickinson, Robert Louis Stevenson and many more – augmented with glittering musical selections the season inspires.