Fifty Shades of Winter

Nature prepares her final work. She begins to strip her canvas of almost everything leaving only little pockets of colour, leaves and berry to cluster on the bleak structure of the land Her command of colour rises to another understanding. The shades of grey, the monochrome from white to black begin to solidify. Falling temperatures hold and freeze everything. The days shorten. The nights lengthen, throwing moon and starlight across the glistening canvas. She dazzles with storm and blizzard. Rest for her will not be easy. Our poets, who have seen this often, know it’s meaning. Their verse evocatively relays their thoughts, their musings, their understanding of all that surrounds the closing of nature’s year. In fifty poems we take you on their inspiring journey, reflecting on the miracle of winter. 01 - Fifty Shades of Winter - An Introduction 02 - Blow Blow Thou Winter Wind by William Shakespeare 03 - Some Too Fragile For Winter Winds by Emily Dickinson 04 - Come Come Thou Bleak December Wind (Fragment 3) by Samuel Taylor Coleridge 05 - Winter by Khalil Gibran 06 - I Who All The Winter Through by Robert Louis Stevenson 07 - Winter Calls by Daniel Sheehan 08 - A Wife in London (December 1899) by Thomas Hardy 09 - The December Rose by Edith Nesbit 10 - Sicily December 1908 by Henry Van Dyke 11 - Sweetheart Winter by Vachel Lindsay 12 - Ode Written on the First of December by Robert Southey 13 - A Calender of Sonnets - December by Helen Hunt Jackson 14 - The Idlers Calendar. Twelve Sonnets For the Months - December by Wilfred Scawen Blunt 15 - The Winters Are So Short by Emily Dickinson 16 - December Matins by Alfred Austin 17 - Sonnet II - When Forty Winters Shall Besiege Thy Brow by William Shakespeare 18 - In Drear Nighted December by John Keats 19 - December by John Bannister Tabb 20 - Winters Naked Wood by Daniel Sheehan 21 - A December Day by Robert Fuller Murray 22 - Snow-Bound (The Sun That Brief December Day) by John Greenleaf Whittier 23 - The Snow Man by Wallace Stevens 24 - Snow Flakes by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 25 - January 1st 1828 by Nathaniel Parker Willis 26 - Written During An Aurora Borealis January 7th 1831 by Henry Alford 27 - Lines on Observing a Blossom on the First of February 1796 by Samuel Taylor Coleridge 28 - February by Edith Nesbit 29 - Pray to What Earth Does This Sweet Cold Belong by Henry David Thoreau 30 - February by Louisa Sarah Bevington 31 - February 3rd 1830 by Henry Alford 32 - In Febuary by Alice Meynell 33 - A Winter Day - Noon and Afternoon by Thomas Aird 34 - In the Bleak Mid-Winter by Christina Georgina Rossetti 35 - The Farm Woman's Winter by Thomas Hardy 36 - Winter Stores by Charlotte Bronte 37 - Afternoon in Febuary by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 38 - February Twilight by Sara Teasdale 39 - To A Locomotive In Winter by Walt Whitman 40 - February Morning by Laurence Binyon 41 - A Valentines Song by Robert Louis Stevenson 42 - To Susanna, February 1824 by Eliza Acton 43 - Winter Heavens by George Meredith 44 - Winter by Robert Louis Stevenson 45 - February by Dollie Radford 46 - Winter - My Secret by Christina Georgina Rossetti 47 - Winter Evening Hymn To My Fire by James Russell Lowell 48 - February by Arthur Christopher Benson 49 - Winter Violets by Alfred Austin 50 - Winter by Anne Bradstreet 51 - How Like a Winter Hath My Absence Been (Sonnet 97) by William Shakespeare