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Winter

one of the Earth's four temperate seasons, occurring between autumn and spring

Winter is one of the four seasons of temperate zones. It is the season with the coldest days and the lowest temperatures. In areas further away from the equator, winter is often marked by cold weather; it is associated with snow, frozen water, and limited daylight.

Under the snow-drifts the blossoms are sleeping,
Dreaming their dreams of sunshine and June,
Down in the hush of their quiet they're keeping
Trills from the throstle's wild summer-sung tune.
—Harriet Prescott Spofford

Arranged alphabetically by author or source:
A · B · C · D · E · F · G · H · I · J · K · L · M · N · O · P · Q · R · S · T · U · V · W · X · Y · Z · See also · External links

A

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  • Last we consider the time of their coming, the season of the year. It was no summer progress. A cold coming they had of it at this time of the year, just the worst time of the year to take a journey, and specially a long journey. The ways deep, the weather sharp, the days short, the sun farthest off, in solsitio brumali, the very dead of winter.

Anonymous

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  • Wynter wakeneth al my care,
       Nou this leves waxeth bare;
    Ofte I sike ant mourne sare
       When hit cometh in my thoht
       Of this worldes joie, hou hit goth al to noht.
    • "Wynter Wakeneth al my Care" (14th cent.), st. 1 (MS. Harl. 2253. f. 49r)
  • This winters weather waxeth cold,
       And frost doth freese on every hill,
    And Boreas blowes his blasts soe bold
       That all our cattell are like to spill.
    • "Take Thy Old Cloak About Thee" (16th cent.), st. 1. Percy's Reliques (1765), vol. 1, p. 172

B

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  • These Winter nights against my window-pane
    Nature with busy pencil draws designs
    Of ferns and blossoms and fine spray of pines,
    Oak-leaf and acorn and fantastic vines,
    Which she will make when summer comes again—
    Quaint arabesques in argent, flat and cold,
    Like curious Chinese etchings.
  • O Winter! bar thine adamantine doors:
    The north is thine; there hast thou built thy dark,
    Deep-founded habitation. Shake not thy roofs,
    Nor bend thy pillars with thine iron car.
  • When now, unsparing as the scourge of war,
    Blasts follow blasts and groves dismantled roar;
    Around their home the storm-pinched cattle lows,
    No nourishment in frozen pasture grows;
    Yet frozen pastures every morn resound
    With fair abundance thund'ring to the ground.
  •                                      Look! the massy trunks
    Are cased in the pure crystal; each light spray,
    Nodding and tinkling in the breath of heaven,
    Is studded with its trembling water-drops,
    That glimmer with an amethystine light.
  • Yet all how beautiful! Pillars of pearl
    Propping the cliffs above, stalactites bright
    From the ice roof depending; and beneath,
    Grottoes and temples with their crystal spires
    And gleaming columns radiant in the sun.
  • The tendinous part of the mind, so to speak, is more developed in winter; the fleshy, in summer. I should say winter had given the bone and sinew to literature, summer the tissues and the blood.

C

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  • But howling Winter fled afar
    To hills that prop the polar star;
    And loves on deer-borne car to ride,
    With barren darkness at his side,
    Round the shore where loud Lofoden
       Whirls to death the roaring whale,
    Round the hall where Runic Odin
       Howls his war-song to the gale.
  • Every Fern is tucked and set,
      'Neath coverlet,
      Downy and soft and warm.
  • O Winter! ruler of the inverted year,
    I crown thee king of intimate delights,
    Fireside enjoyments, home-born happiness,
    And all the comforts that the lowly roof
    Of undisturb'd Retirement, and the hours
    Of long uninterrupted evening, know.

D

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  • There’s a certain Slant of light,
    Winter Afternoons –
    That oppresses, like the Heft
    Of Cathedral Tunes –

E

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  • Winter kept us warm, covering
    Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
    A little life with dried tubers.
  • Observe and see how (in the winter) all the trees seem as though they had withered and shed all their leaves, except fourteen trees, which do not lose their foliage but retain the old foliage from two to three years till the new comes.
    • Book of Enoch, ch. 3, as translated by R. H. Charles, The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament in English, vol. 2 (Oxford, 1913), p. 189

F

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Do not want to go out in fridge-crossed-with-swimming-pool-like world. —Helen Fielding
  • ’Tis a dull sight
       To see the year dying,
    When winter winds
       Set the yellow wood sighing:
          Sighing, O sighing!

G

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  • On that winter day when Nature was deep in her annual slumber and seemed to have kicked the clothes off. Copses, dells, quarries and all hidden places, which had been mysterious mines for exploration in leafy summer, now exposed themselves and their secrets.

K

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  • On a lone winter evening, when the frost
    Has wrought a silence.
  • His breath like silver arrows pierced the air,
    The naked earth crouched shuddering at his feet,
    His finger on all flowing waters sweet
    Forbidding lay—motion nor sound was there:—
    Nature was frozen dead,—and still and slow,
    A winding sheet fell o'er her body fair,
    Flaky and soft, from his wide wings of snow.
  •                                                  Every winter,
    When the great sun has turned his face away,
    The earth goes down into a vale of grief,
    And fasts, and weeps, and shrouds herself in sables,
    Leaving her wedding-garlands to decay—
    Then leaps in spring to his returning kisses.

L

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  • Never tell me of the sterner beauties of winter. Winter may have a mighty beauty of its own, where the mountain rises, white with the snow of a thousand years, hemmed in by black pine forests, eternal in their gloom; where the overhanging avalanche makes terrible even the slightest sound of the human voice ; and where waters that never flowed spread the glittering valleys with the frost-work of the measureless past. But the characteristic of English scenery is loveliness. We look for the verdant green of her fields, for the colours of her wild and garden flowers, for daisies universal as hope, and for the cheerful hedges, so various in leaf and bud. Winter comes to us with gray mists and drizzling rains: now and then, for a day, the frost creates its own fragile and fairy world of gossamer; but not often. We see the desolate trees, bleak and bare; the dreary meadows, the withered gardens, and close door and window, to exclude the fog and the east wind.
  • Up rose the wild old winter-king,
      And shook his beard of snow;
    "I hear the first young hare-bell ring,
      'Tis time for me to go!
        Northward o'er the icy rocks,
        Northward o'er the sea,
    My daughter comes with sunny locks:
        This land's too warm for me!"
  • Oh the long and dreary Winter!
    Oh the cold and cruel Winter!
    Ever thicker, thicker, thicker
    Froze the ice on lake and river,
    Ever deeper, deeper, deeper
    Fell the snow o’er all the landscape,
    Fell the covering snow, and drifted
    Through the forest, round the village.

M

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  •    Clouded with snow
       The bleak winds blow,
    And shrill on leafless bough
    The robin with its burning breast
       Alone sings now.

P

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  • Winter is icummen in,
    Lhude sing Goddamm,
    Raineth drop and staineth slop,
    And how the wind doth ramm!
       Sing: Goddamm.

R

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  • 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.
  • Wintry boughs against a wintry sky;
      Yet the sky is partly blue
        And the clouds are partly bright:—
    Who can tell but sap is mounting high
        Out of sight,
    Ready to burst through?

S

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When blood is nipp’d and ways be foul. —Shakespeare
  • Here feel we but the penalty of Adam,
    The seasons' difference, as the icy fang
    And churlish chiding of the winter's wind,
    Which, when it bites and blows upon my body,
    Even till I shrink with cold, I smile and say,
    "This is no flattery."
  • Winter's not gone yet, if the wild-geese fly that way.
    • William Shakespeare, King Lear (1608), act 2, sc. 4, l. 46
  • When icicles hang by the wall,
       And Dick the shepherd blows his nail,
    And Tom bears logs into the hall,
       And milk comes frozen home in pail,
    When blood is nipp’d and ways be foul,
       Then nightly sings the staring owl,
                 Tu-whit;
    Tu-who, a merry note,
    While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.
    When all aloud the wind doth blow,
       And coughing drowns the parson’s saw,
    And birds sit brooding in the snow,
       And Marian’s nose looks red and raw,
    When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl.
  • How like a winter hath my absence been
    From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!
    What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen!
  • In winter, when the dismal rain
      Came down in slanting lines,
    And Wind, that grand old harper, smote
      His thunder-harp of pines.
  • Lastly came Winter cloathed all in frize,
    Chattering his teeth for cold that did him chill;
    Whilst on his hoary beard his breath did freese,
    And the dull drops, that from his purpled bill
    As from a limebeck did adown distill:
    In his right hand a tipped staffe he held,
    With which his feeble steps he stayed still;
    For he was faint with cold, and weak with eld;
    That scarce his loosed limbes he hable was to weld.
    • Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene (ed. 1609), bk. 7, canto 7, st. 31 (Legend of Constancie)
  • Under the snow-drifts the blossoms are sleeping,
      Dreaming their dreams of sunshine and June,
    Down in the hush of their quiet they're keeping
      Trills from the throstle's wild summer-sung tune.
  • She wanders to an iceberg oriflammed
    With rayed, auroral guidons of the North—
    Wherein hath winter hidden ardent gems
    And treasuries of frozen anadems,
    Alight with timid sapphires of the snow.

T

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  • See, Winter comes, to rule the varied year,
    Sullen and sad, with all his rising train;
    Vapors, and Clouds, and Storms.
  • Through the hush'd air the whitening Shower descends,
    At first thin wavering; till at last the Flakes
    Fall broad, and wide, and fast, dimming the day
    With a continual flow. The cherished Fields
    Put on their winter-robe of purest white,
    'Tis brightness all; save where the new Snow melts
    Along the mazy current.
    • James Thomson, Winter (1726), l. 229
  • Dread Winter spreads his latest glooms,
    And reigns, tremendous, o'er the conquer'd Year.
    How dead the vegetable kingdom lies!
    How dumb the tuneful! Horror wide extends
    His desolate domain.
    • James Thomson, Winter (1726), l. 1,024
  • Many of the phenomena of Winter are suggestive of an inexpressible tenderness and fragile delicacy. We are accustomed to hear this king described as a rude and boisterous tyrant; but with the gentleness of a lover he adorns the tresses of Summer.

W

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  • Make we here our camp of winter;
      And, through sleet and snow,
    Pitchy knot and beechen splinter
      On our hearth shall glow.
    Here, with mirth to lighten duty,
      We shall lack alone
    Woman's smile and girlhood's beauty,
      Childhood's lisping tone.
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