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Celebrate the Season with Poetry
As the days grows shorter, and the temperature dips, find poems to help celebrate and enrich the season's family gatherings, holiday feasts, twinkling lights, and new resolutions.
Poems for Winter
Although the long, freezing winter nights and the crisp winter days often inspire harsh feelings among those 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 winter weather is a chance to speak in defiance of nature. In "January," William Carlos Williams implores the winter wind: "Play louder. / You will not succeed. I am / bound more to my sentences / the more you batter at me / to follow you."
Read the entire essay at: www.poets.org/winter
Poems for Christmas
While it may be difficult to imagine the Christmas season without a jolly, plump, rosy-cheeked and white-bearded Santa Claus, it was actually an anonymous poem published in 1823 that first depicted this emblematic characterization. Beginning with the now-famous line, "'Twas the Night Before Christmas," the poem offered a different take on Santa Claus: "He had a broad face and a little round belly / That shook, when he laughed, like a bowl full of jelly. / He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf."
Read the entire essay at: www.poets.org/christmas
Poems for Chanukah
The holiday's themes of redemption, rebellion, and rededication have found rich expression in the work of many poets. Their words can offer prayers, narratives, commentary, and a meaningful addition to the holiday observance. Profound meaning can even be found in the act of lighting the candles, as Charles Reznikoff observes: "In a world where each man must be of use / and each thing useful, the rebellious Jews / light not one light but eight-- / not to see by but to look at."
Read the entire essay at: www.poets.org/chanukah
Poems for New Year's
For centuries, it has been the charge of Britain's Poet Laureate to write a poem to ring in the New Year. Laureate Nahum Tate established this practice, having written eight New Year odes between 1693 and 1708. And the phrase "ring out the old, ring in the new" first comes from another laureate’s pen, Lord Alfred Tennyson, from his most well-known poem, "In Memoriam": "Ring out the old, ring in the new, / Ring, happy bells, across the snow: / The year is going, let him go; / Ring out the false, ring in the true."
Read the entire essay at: www.poets.org/newyears
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