[5] 107 In the Bleak Midwinter

‘In the bleak midwinter frosty winds made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone.
Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter, long ago.’

I treaded out of the house this morning, once more crunching the powdery snow underfoot. Sadly (or maybe not so sadly…) after a week of perfect snow, the thaw then arrived. Returning at lunch, I practically had to wade down the pavement of the main road. As suddenly as it had arrived last week, the crisp white snow had dissolved into a torrent of dirty slush. As wet as my trainers are now, I’m sure they’ll be worse later in the week when the melt-water floods the river…

Which got me thinking. This week at least, snow has fallen snow on snow (snow… on… snow…), the campus lake has turned as if to stone, and, even if the wind hasn’t been too bad, the central heating has certainly ‘made moan’. So, I chose this carol to examine more closely.

On the surface; it’s poetic fluff. Hardly any snow falls in the holy land (oh, except in January 2000 (see picture), but that was probably just the start of the millennial apocalypse, so that doesn’t count), and there seems to be nothing of real spiritual ‘merit’ in the first verse. It contains nothing but a weather report, and a dramatised one at that. It’s really easy to deride Rossetti, the poet who wrote this and another gushing classic ‘Love Came Down at Christmas, / Love all lovely, Love divine.’ She is the epitome of Victorian sentimentality, and also partakes in the contemporary Imperial tradition of relocating everything to the Home Counties. Such practice is laughable, off-topic and out-of-date. Or is it?

Just as Judah rarely suffered snow-fall, the UK rarely avoids it entirely. There are very few cultural points of reference for Industrial Age Britons in the Nativity story: we no longer travel for censuses, sheep farmers are negligible in number compared to office workers, we no longer use myrrh to embalm our dead. In this carol, Rossetti is offering us one vital link to the past. She is saying; look – around you now is snow, the very same as (possibly) fell on that night so many years ago.

Rossetti is connecting us to a time that often seems culturally unintelligible to our own. Look at the third verse, where the first half describes unimaginable thronging angels, and the second half connects that to a very tangible and universal image; the mother and child. Thank-you, Christina, and sorry for doubting you. Thanks be to God.