Fifty Shades of Winter: 50 of the best poems about winter

Nature prepares her final work. She begins to strip her canvas of almost everything leaving only little pockets of colour, leaves and berry to cluster on the bleak structure of the land
Her command of colour rises to another understanding. The shades of grey, the monochrome from white to black begin to solidify. Falling temperatures hold and freeze everything. The days shorten. The nights lengthen, throwing moon and starlight across the glistening canvas. She dazzles with storm and blizzard. Rest for her will not be easy.

Our poets, who have seen this often, know it’s meaning. Their verse evocatively relays their thoughts, their musings, their understanding of all that surrounds the closing of nature’s year.

In fifty poems we take you on their inspiring journey, reflecting on the miracle of winter.

01 - Fifty Shades of Winter - An Introduction

02 - Blow Blow Thou Winter Wind by William Shakespeare

03 - Some Too Fragile For Winter Winds by Emily Dickinson

04 - Come Come Thou Bleak December Wind (Fragment 3) by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

05 - Winter by Khalil Gibran

06 - I Who All The Winter Through by Robert Louis Stevenson

07 - Winter Calls by Daniel Sheehan

08 - A Wife in London (December 1899) by Thomas Hardy

09 - The December Rose by Edith Nesbit

10 - Sicily December 1908 by Henry Van Dyke

11 - Sweetheart Winter by Vachel Lindsay

12 - Ode Written on the First of December by Robert Southey

13 - A Calender of Sonnets - December by Helen Hunt Jackson

14 - The Idlers Calendar. Twelve Sonnets For the Months - December by Wilfred Scawen Blunt

15 - The Winters Are So Short by Emily Dickinson

16 - December Matins by Alfred Austin

17 - Sonnet II - When Forty Winters Shall Besiege Thy Brow by William Shakespeare

18 - In Drear Nighted December by John Keats

19 - December by John Bannister Tabb

20 - Winters Naked Wood by Daniel Sheehan

21 - A December Day by Robert Fuller Murray

22 - Snow-Bound (The Sun That Brief December Day) by John Greenleaf Whittier

23 - The Snow Man by Wallace Stevens

24 - Snow Flakes by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

25 - January 1st 1828 by Nathaniel Parker Willis

26 - Written During An Aurora Borealis January 7th 1831 by Henry Alford

27 - Lines on Observing a Blossom on the First of February 1796 by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

28 - February by Edith Nesbit

29 - Pray to What Earth Does This Sweet Cold Belong by Henry David Thoreau

30 - February by Louisa Sarah Bevington

31 - February 3rd 1830 by Henry Alford

32 - In Febuary by Alice Meynell

33 - A Winter Day - Noon and Afternoon by Thomas Aird

34 - In the Bleak Mid-Winter by Christina Georgina Rossetti

35 - The Farm Woman's Winter by Thomas Hardy

36 - Winter Stores by Charlotte Bronte

37 - Afternoon in Febuary by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

38 - February Twilight by Sara Teasdale

39 - To A Locomotive In Winter by Walt Whitman

40 - February Morning by Laurence Binyon

41 - A Valentines Song by Robert Louis Stevenson

42 - To Susanna, February 1824 by Eliza Acton

43 - Winter Heavens by George Meredith

44 - Winter by Robert Louis Stevenson

45 - February by Dollie Radford

46 - Winter - My Secret by Christina Georgina Rossetti

47 - Winter Evening Hymn To My Fire by James Russell Lowell

48 - February by Arthur Christopher Benson

49 - Winter Violets by Alfred Austin

50 - Winter by Anne Bradstreet

51 - How Like a Winter Hath My Absence Been (Sonnet 97) by William Shakespeare