Dickinson’s Winter Welcome

'Winter is good — his Hoar delights’

Jan 22, 2008 Linda Sue Grimes

The speaker in Emily Dickinson's short winter poem slyly humbles the cold season but not before distinguishing its multitude of genuine positive attributes.

Emily Dickinson can create speakers who are every bit as a tricky as Robert Frost’s tricky speakers. Her two-stanza, eight-line lyric announcing that “Winter is good” attests to the poet’s skill of seemingly praising while showing disdain in the same breath.

The rime scheme of “Winter is good — his Hoar delights” enforces the slant rime predilection with the ABAB approximation in each stanza. All of the rimes are near/slant in the first stanza, while the second boasts a perfect rime in Rose/goes.

First Stanza: “Winter is good — his Hoar Delights”

The speaker claims rather blandly that “Winter is good” but quickly adds not so plainly that his frost is delightful. That winter’s frost would delight one, however, depends on the individual’s ability to achieve a of drunkenness with “Summer” or “the World.” For those who fancy summer and become “inebriat[ed]” with the warm season’s charms, winter takes some digging to unearth its buried charm.

But those frozen frosts will “yield” their “Italic flavor” to those who are perceptive and desirous enough to pursue any “Delights” that may be held there. The warmth of the Italian climate renders the summer flavors a madness held in check by an other-worldliness provided by the northern climes. Becoming drunk with winter, therefore, is a very different sport from finding oneself inebriated with summer, which can be, especially with Dickinson, akin to spiritual intoxication.

Second Stanza: “Generic as a Quarry”

Nevertheless, the speaker, before her hard-hitting yet softly-applied critique, makes it clear that winter holds much to be honored; after all the season is “Generic as a Quarry / And hearty — as a Rose.” It generates enough to be considered a repository like a stone quarry that can be mined for all types of valuable rocks, gems, and granite.

The season is “hearty” in the same manner that a lovely flower is “hearty.” The rose, although it can be a fickle and finicky plant to cultivate, provides a strength of beauty that rivals other blossoms. That the freezing season is replete with beauty and motivating natural elements renders it a fertile time for the fertile mind of the poet.

But despite the useful and luxuriant possibilities of winter, even the mind that is perceptive enough to appreciate its magnanimity has to be relieved when that frozen season leaves the premises or as the speaker so refreshingly puts it, he is “welcome when he goes.”

Other Dickinson articles:

• Dickinson’s Winter: “Like Brooms of Steel”
• Dickinson’s Slant of Light: Intuition Through Winter Melancholy
• December Poet – Emily Dickinson: Dickinson’s “Twas just this time, last year, I died”
• Dickinson’s “I heard a Fly buzz”: Mystical Adeptness
• Dickinson’s Summer: “I know a place where Summer strives”
• “A Bird came down the Walk”: Dickinson’s Frightened Beads
• Dickinson’s Spiritual Intoxication: “I taste a liquor never brewed”
• Dickinson’s Riddles: “It sifts from leaden sieves” and “I like to see it lap the miles”
• Looking Back from Eternity: Dickinson’s “Because I could not stop for Death”
• The Nun of Amherst: Dickinson’s Spiritual Poetry
• Emily's Brain: Dickinson’s “The Brain is wider than the Sky”

The copyright of the article Dickinson’s Winter Welcome in Poetry is owned by Linda Sue Grimes. Permission to republish Dickinson’s Winter Welcome in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

Emily Dickinson