1. To Know The Dark by Wendell Berry
To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
2. A Winter Solstice Prayer by Edward Hays
Excerpt: The dark shadow of space leans over us…
3. The Shortest Day by Susan Cooper
Excerpt: So the shortest day came, and the year died,
4. An Old Man’s Winter Night by Robert Frost
Excerpt: All out-of-doors looked darkly in at him Through the thin frost, almost in separate stars, That gathers on the pane in empty rooms. What kept his eyes from giving back the gaze Was the lamp tilted near them in his hand.
5. To Winter by Claude McKay
6. Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden
Excerpt: Sundays too my father got up early and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, then with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather made banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
7. Snow by Derek Walcott
8. White-Eyes by Mary Oliver
9. Little Gidding by T.S. Eliot
Excerpt: I Midwinter spring is its own season Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown, Suspended in time, between pole and tropic. When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire, The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches, In windless cold that is the heart’s heat, Reflecting in a watery mirror A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon.
10. The World by Jennifer Chang
Excerpt: One winter I lived north, alone and effortless, dreaming myself into the past. Perhaps, I thought, words could replenish privacy.
11. In the Bleak Midwinter by Christina Rossetti
13. The Cold Earth Slept Below by Percy Bysshe Shelley
14. Snow by Naomi Shihab Nye
15. Blow, blow, thou winter wind by William Shakespeare
Below is Shakespeare’s poem set to music by John Rutter.
What are your favorite winter poems? Want even more poetry coverage? We got you.
