29/11/2025
We had a fantastic (if a little damp) walk today, hosted by Tom who had found some ‘winter poems’ to read whilst we wandered through the Heath. For those wanting to remember, these were the poems - all worth a proper read (even if you weren’t able to make it!)
1. “Winter” – William Shakespeare
Song from Love’s Labour’s Lost (“When icicles hang by the wall…”)
🌬️ This is the one with frozen milk, red and the owl going “tu-whit, tu-who”
https://poets.org/poem/loves-labours-lost-act-v-scene-2-winter
2. “Frost at Midnight” – Samuel Taylor Coleridge
🕯️ The quiet cottage at night, the father awake beside his sleeping baby, dreaming of a freer, nature-filled life for his son.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43986/frost-at-midnight
3. “The Prelude, Book I: Childhood and School-Time” (skating passage) – William Wordsworth
❄️ The childhood memory: boys skating on a frozen lake in the dark, “hissing” along the ice while cliffs and bare trees ring and echo around them.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45542/the-prelude-book-1-childhood-and-school-time
(Skating scene starts “And in the frosty season, when the sun…”)
4. “Winter Rain” – Christina Rossetti
🌧️ The drizzly one! Weeks of soaking rain feeding buds, lambs, moss, daisies and lilies – the argument that today’s grey wet is the secret engine of spring.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/19188/19188-h/19188-h.htm 
5. “The Darkling Thrush” – Thomas Hardy. The end-of-the-century poem: a bleak, bare winter landscape that feels like a “corpse” of the old century.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44325/the-darkling-thrush
6. “First Sight” – Philip Larkin
🐑 The lambs in the snow: their first experience of a “wretched width of cold”, and Larkin’s surprisingly hopeful thought that a gentler season is coming they can’t yet imagine.
https://poemanalysis.com/philip-larkin/first-sight/
Putney Heath Walk & Talk. Every Saturday at 10.30 from outside . Free to attend, meet new people in the community.
