Winter Trees

DBH created this wonderful video this last winter 2021; we decided to set it to music and the choice was obvious: Vivaldi’s Winter. For a blog accompanying this visual treat of the trees around our home, I give way to my favourite poet of all time: T.S. Eliot. The following quotation is taken from the Little Gidding section of the inimitable Four Quartets which I first remember reading when I was eight years old:

Midwinter spring is its own season
Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown,
Suspended in time, between pole and tropic.
When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire,
The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches,
In windless cold that is the heart’s heat,
Reflecting in a watery mirror
A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon.
And glow more intense than blaze of branch, or brazier,
Stirs the dumb spirit: no wind, but pentecostal fire
In the dark time of the year. Between melting and freezing
The soul’s sap quivers. There is no earth smell
Or smell of living thing. This is the spring time
But not in time’s covenant. Now the hedgerow
Is blanched for an hour with transitory blossom
Of snow, a bloom more sudden
Than that of summer, neither budding nor fading,
Not in the scheme of generation.
Where is the summer, the unimaginable
Zero summer?

To my mind, both Eliot and Vivaldi succeed in subtly referencing all the other seasons while paying homage to the time of year of the composition’s subject.

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