In the bleak mid-winter
Frosty wind made moan;
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow,
Snow on snow,
In the bleak mid-winter
Long ago. (“A Christmas Carol” by Christina Rossetti)
On a cold, dark night early in the new year, we find ourselves in a wood, seeking something. The trouble is, that rummage as we may in what Prospero calls “the dark and backward abysm of time”, we can’t seem to come up with what that something might be. Do we seek poetry, love, light, provision? Do we seek “the bubble reputation”, or some other concept or idea? Do we seek warmth? A simple fire or something to warm our winter weary bones? Whatever it may be, we are here, and our path appears to be heavily strewn with grasping tendrils and jagged opinions. Should we chance to stumble for any reason, we may fall down amongst dark stones and never rise again.
Although the year has only just turned, we seem to be antipodes distant from the fresh lap of the crimson rose. Hoary headed frosts have seized the crown of night and the wolf behowls the moon. Damn. We are gone to Goblin Market in a handcart. Trash tinsel shreds in a gutter. The sparkle of broken ornaments. Fire long since gone out. Guests departed. Wind roughing and tossing treetops in the forlorn night.
Our frozen night seems hopeless. Just don’t taste the fruit. Better not to even look at it. Damn, Pandora! I told you not to open that!
Yet, the bleakness suggested by the beginning of Rossetti’s poem is belied by the rest of the verses. The poem became enormously popular as a hymn, set to music by Gustave Holst (around 1906?), after Christina Rossetti published it in 1872. Holst’s music reinforces Rossetti’s lines, playing to us of hope and redemption, music that, like the heart offering in the final stanza, makes humans ascendant supplicants potentially equal of angels.
Here is the hymn, sung by the choir of King’s College, Cambridge University:
Interestingly, Shakespeare’s desolation often offers a kind of redemption too, albeit it can seem much bitterer and it isn’t always clear or uncomplicated. Wandering in the storm with his fool, King Lear’s mind erodes a precipitously as his privilege has done. Famously, the external storm echoes the internal, the landscape of the storm reflecting that of the dissolution taking place within the man himself. Lear eventually finds companionship and rude shelter, but it stands in stark contrast to his custom, as he shelters in a rude hovel. Raging against the storm and raving about injustice, a shred of Lear’s wits return to him in a moment of compassion. He thinks of his fool, who has been out with him in the terrible storm:
Storms in Shakespeare seem to represent a kind of atmospheric desolation–tumultuous overturnings of the air, just as desolate spaces often seem to represent those places where the self is left uncharacteristically unsupported, and dependent only on his or her own devices. * Simply these are turning points, places where the self must face the demons or face the self. Yoda on Dagobah urging Luke Skywalker into the cave, the “place of evil”. “In you must go,” he offers simply.
Whether storm or desert, forest or desert island, in lightning, thunder, or in rain, the confrontation remains somehow removed from everyday existence, even if that wilderness where it must take place (like in Rossetti’s poem) is in the wilderness of the human heart. Various layers of abstraction can make this seem increasingly obscure. In Love’s Labour’s Lost, the struggle takes place on the battleground of convictions. In Timon of Athens, Timon’s struggle takes place partly within his own bonds of loyalty and generosity.
Wherever the wilderness appears, even if it is an external wilderness, thunder, cloud, or wood, it evinces roots that extend deeply into the human self. Prospero’s island is a place where the former Duke has subdued the wilderness through the artificial means of magic–a place where his stamp of civilisation remains tenuous, no matter how civilised it may seem in comparison with his various enemies’ conceptions and efforts. Puck may be seen as representing a kind of wilderness unto himself, constantly chafing against the reigns of order that the fairy and the mortal worlds would have imposed.
A landscape of change, the wilderness represents the space where changes are able to take place. It is the deep running of still water. The inner place of tumult in human existence and experience. As Lyle Lovett sings:
And if I were like lightning
I wouldn’t need no sneakers
I’d come and go wherever I would please
And I’d scare ’em by the shade tree
And I’d scare ’em by the light pole
But I would not scare my pony on my boat out on the sea. (“If I Had a Boat” lyrics by Lyle Lovett)
While the human state itself may be defined by change, the storm within it remains somehow constant and eternal in a peculiar way. The wind and the rain is always with us, and we come to prefer its risks and discomforts to the treachery of human nature:
Blow, blow, thou winter wind
Thou art not so unkind
As man’s ingratitude;
Thy tooth is not so keen,
Because thou art not seen,
Although thy breath be rude.
Heigh-ho! sing, heigh-ho! unto the green holly:
Most friendship if feigning, most loving mere folly:
Then heigh-ho, the holly!
This life is most jolly.
Freeze, freeze thou bitter sky,
That does not bite so nigh
As benefits forgot:
Though thou the waters warp,
Thy sting is not so sharp
As a friend remembered not.
Heigh-ho! sing, heigh-ho! unto the green holly:
Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly:
Then heigh-ho, the holly!
This life is most jolly. (As You Like It, 2.7.179-98) **
Human aspects of life desert us and leave us bereft, abandoning us in wild places where the wind and weather may devour us. The only solace may be in the unfathomable movement of the divine, the constancy of wilderness and desolation, where emptiness remains our only dependable companion. The open grave, the point of the bare bodkin. Even memory cannot save us:
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown. (Eliot, “The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock”)
It remains the art of our necessities that makes things precious, as Lear says. Perhaps only in the heart, whether in Lear’s almost forgotten compassion or in Prospero’s forgiveness of his usurping brother, lies a true road to the divine. Perhaps Rosetti’s hymn gets that right intuitively, especially in terms of recognition of the fellow human condition.
Let’s hope so, anyway. Especially just now. Perhaps if we lead the new year with compassion, it may turn out as beautifully as a hymn. Maybe then we won’t leave so many sleeping out in the cold.
*Gwilym Jones has written a well touted book about storms in Shakespeare, called (not surprisingly) Shakespeare’s Storms, and Jeanne Addison Roberts wrote an interesting book called The Shakespearean Wild: Geography, Genus, and Gender.
**As stated elsewhere in this blog, the song is echoed in King Lear.