Winter Fields

I am working with some students from the University of Waterloo on an audio CD containing various works of poetry. The CD is for the University's distance-ed programme. One of the poems I have recorded is this one by Charles Roberts. It's incredibly beautiful! As I read it I'm taken back to my days living in Sundell, in Upper Michigan. We lived "out there," on a dead end logging road. Our neighbours were few. A carpenter, a farmer, a retired boxer. Salt of the earth. But it was the land I remember most, especially winter. Just how beautiful this land was, I could never express in words. Although the author has a bleaker view of winter, I love this poem for it's esthetics, and it's word choice. Absolutely beautiful!!

Winter Fields
Charles Roberts

Winds here, and sleet, and frost that bites like steel.
The low bleak hill rounds under the low sky.
Naked of flock and fold and fallows lie,
Thin streaked with meagre drift. The gusts reveal
By fits the dim grey snakes of fence, that steal

Through the white dusk. The hill-foot poplars sigh,
While storm and death with winter trample by,
And iron fields ring sharp, and blind lights reel.
Yet in the lonely ridges, wrenched with pain,
Harsh solitary hillocks, bound and dumb,

Grave glebes close-lipped beneath the scourge and chain
Lurks hid the germ of ecstasy - the sum
Of life that waits on summer, till the rain
Whisper in April and the crocus come.