Thought we’d share this somewhat gloomy take on Boxing Day from our archives. The poem was published in the journal ‘Milling’, 28 Dec 1895.
The Winter Woods: Boxing Day
By a dyspeptic miller
Image: Bateman’s Mill, Burwash, with frozen pond, April 1970. Photo by Frank Gregory
Those woodlands in winter I cannot forget;
How long on that snow I could softly have lain;
Or dreamed on those mosses, so mellow and wet,
While winds moaned around like some wood nymph in pain.
And here did I rest on a boulder alone,
Though not quite alone, as I afterwards knew;
There were dear little centipeds under the stone,
And sweet little earwigs secreted from view.
Those leaves, dank and withered, that once had been young;
What moral was theirs for a beautiful text;
Their time had arrived to be trampled as dung,
A cheerful remainder that mine might be next.
A thrush, that the frost had made reckless and bold,
Was carving a snail, with his beak for a knife;
While a robin, with plumage puffed out for the cold,
Engaged with a maggot, was tugging for life.
Some hips, out of reach of the schoolboy, o’erhead
The famishing birds had already begun;
‘Twas food some could tackle, while others lay dead;
But – Nature’s last hope – it was better than none.
The mill dam below had a deep frozen crust,
The ice stopped our wheel, and the sluices were stuck:
The miller, a testy old son of the dust,
I could hear in the distance was blessing his luck!
The snow under foot and the aspect around
Had happy suggestions of ruin and wreck;
I pondered my path – there was need on such ground –
With drip from the trees coming fresh down my neck.
Yet, give me such peaceful seclusion, I cried:
It’s balm to the brain and it’s rest for the limb –
Just then on some fungus I managed to slide,
And – crash! through the briars – sat down with a “vim”!
Ye men of a thousand necessities here
The change can be felt to excite you afresh;
I shall feel it myself for the rest of the year,
That blow from the ground and those thorns in the flesh.
That hour in the woods of the winter has sped;
But winds chilled my bones and my boot sprung a leak;
And here am I, blowing a cold in my head
And likely to keep to my chambers a week.
