1. Winter – Edwin Morgan

2. Winter – Edwin Morgan The poem is full of nihilism*:
things keep dying, decaying and disappearing.
First colour, then sounds fade away
The poem is full of monstrous and disturbing images
‘Winter’ = a nature poem about death (like ‘Hyena’!)
* The idea that life has no meaning

3. Winter – Themes Nihilism (world / life has no meaning) Despair
Humanity’s lack of importance in the world
Nature

4. Winter – Form Free verse First person narrator
Present tense (sense of immediacy?)

5. Lines 1-3
The year goes, the woods decay, and after, Many a summer dies. The swan on Bingham’s pond, a ghost, comes and goes.
Poem feels negative from start
first three verbs: ‘goes’ (repeated), ‘decay’ and ‘dies’
All link to loss and sadness
The swan – rather than representing the beauty of nature, represents death / haunting
Losing more than we had
Alliteration

6. Lines 4-7
Ice survives and holds on when other warmer, livelier things like woods, summer and the swan do not
Gulls confused by the ice – slightly ridiculous
Oxymoron – strange quality of winter light
Alliteration – boys are first humans in poem
Inanimate (not alive) skates emphasised, not boys
It goes, and ice appears, it holds, bears gulls that stand around surprised, blinking in the heavy light, bears boys when skates take over swan-tracks gone.

7. Lines 8-10
Contradiction: first white, then beyond white. Morgan creates first, positive colour, then pulls back from it
Irony - cannot see things as a poet normally sees them despite being a poet himself
Contributes to bleak mood
After many summer dyes, the swan-white ice glints only crystal beyond white. Even dearest blue’s not there, though poets would find it.

8. Lines 11-14
word choice: scene is barren, bleak and desolate
First person narrator only introduced now! Humanity is unimportant
Poem begins with visual information. Now: sounds.
word choice: ‘cut’ suggests violence
'warring air’ again suggests violence and conflict
Fades = negative – recalls ‘goes’ and ‘decay’
I find one stark scene cut by evening cries, by warring air. The muffled hiss of blades escapes into breath, hangs with it a moment, fades off.

9. Recalls first line – repetition of decay
Lines 15-16
Two more uses of ‘fades’ – three in total! We are losing something – analogy between winter and death
Recalls first line – repetition of decay
Fades off, goes, the scene, the voices fade, the line of trees, the woods that fall, decay

10. Lines 17-18
humanity leaves the poem. First the ‘voices fade’ (15) as the boys skate away. Then ‘shouts’ ‘disappear’.
The darkness = more powerful than the children.
boys become not people but just noises, ‘shouts’, who disappear into it.
swan / gulls/ skating boys all now gone
Only living thing left = ‘woods’ which are decaying / falling / breaking (hardly full of life)
and break, the dark comes down, the shouts run off into it and disappear.

11. Lines
Fog personified – actively threatening
Word choice suggests something evil lying in wait
Even nature is left behind – ugly / artificial motorway
End of the world / frontier? Meaning is ambiguous
At last the lamps go too, when fog
drives monstrous down the dual carriageway
out to the west…

12. Ambiguity - does ‘not know’ about ice - contradicts earlier lines
very small space, ‘in my room/ and on this paper’. narrator feels vulnerable and helpless.
Ambiguity - does ‘not know’ about ice - contradicts earlier lines
The ending = very nihilistic: nothingness
Repetition
…and even in my room and on this paper I do not know about that grey dead pane of ice that sees nothing and that nothing sees.

13. Tithonus - Tennyson
The woods decay, the woods decay and fall, The vapours weep their burthen to the ground, Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath, And after many a summer dies the swan. Me only cruel immortality Consumes: I wither slowly in thine arms, Here at the quiet limit of the world, A white-hair'd shadow roaming like a dream The ever-silent spaces of the East, Far-folded mists, and gleaming halls of morn. Alas! for this gray shadow, once a man— So glorious in his beauty and thy choice, Who madest him thy chosen, that he seem'd To his great heart none other than a God!