“In the Bleak Midwinter,” a poem by Christina Rossetti
White on White, White on White
A haunting image of impending death in the snow: “Fox Hunt” (1893)
by Winslow Homer from the
collection at
Source: Wikimedia Commons
|
In Christina Rossetti’s poem “In the Bleak Midwinter,”
mention of snow in the fifth line prompts a memorable incantation of endless
snowfalls.
In the bleak mid-winter
Frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow,
Snow on snow,
In the bleak mid-winter
Long ago.
Frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow,
Snow on snow,
In the bleak mid-winter
Long ago.
The repetition of “snow on snow/Snow on snow” has long been
my favorite moment in the entire poem. These are not the pretty
snowflakes of Christmas cards. This snow is defined by the context:
the bleak winter, the frosty winds, the frozen ground, the ice.
Snow is the final ingredient added to the wintry mix.
It coats Rossetti’s bleak landscape in whiteness. White is a tricky color
in art. There’s one set of traditional imagery that places the good guys
in white and the bad in black, but that’s not Rossetti’s way. The
whiteness of her landscape is a frigid blankness.
Rossetti was probably unfamiliar with the work of her
American contemporary Herman Melville, who published Moby-Dick in 1851. Nevertheless, her bleak use of white
reminds me of Melville’s exploration of whiteness in Chapter 42 of Moby-Dick, “The Whiteness of the Whale.” Melville writes:
An illustration by A. Burnham Shute from an 1892 edition of Moby-Dick. Source: Wikimedia Commons |
“Is it that by its indefiniteness
it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus
stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white
depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much
a color as the visible absence of color; and at the same time the concrete of
all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full
of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colorless, all-color of atheism from
which we shrink?”
Many years before I read Moby-Dick, I learned about this horrific view of whiteness when reading a book
called Horror in the Cinema by
Ivan Butler. In discussing the weird early sound movie Vampyr (1932) by Carl Dreyer, Butler references Melville
in his discussion of a nightmarish scene where a doctor becomes trapped in a flour mill. White eerily predominates in the scene as the character
disappears under blankets of flour. With Melville in mind, Butler suggests that a pervasive whiteness
can be more terrifying than the dark.
I think this is the white-upon-white/snow-upon-snow effect
that Rossetti summons up in the opening stanza of “In the Bleak
Midwinter.” It’s the vast whiteness of “heartless voids and immensities”
and of “a colorless all-color of atheism from which we shrink.” It is
Rossetti’s image of the world without God—infinite, frozen, and devoid of color.
The evil doctor is buried alive in the flour mill in Carl Dreyer's Vampyr (1932). |
The Music Room
Allison Crowe performs “In the Bleak Midwinter” on her live television
special Tidings…
Reference Sources
Poems of Christina
Rossetti, edited by William M. Rossetti
Selected Poems of
Christina Rossetti, edited by Marya Zaturenska
Christina Rossetti: A
Writer’s Life by Jan Marsh
The Achievement of
Christina Rossetti, edited by David A. Kent
Christina Rossetti
(Bloom’s Major Poets), edited by Harold Bloom
Christina Rossetti’s
Faithful Imagination by Dinah Roe
Christina Rossetti:
Faith, Gender and Time by Diane D’Amico
Genius by Harold
Bloom
The Man Who Invented
Christmas by Les Standiford
The Pre-Raphaelites
by Andrea Rose
Victorian Painting
by Christopher Wood
... and an occasional sneak glance at Wikipedia entries (but
always double-checking everything!)
© 2011 Lee Price
Oh, that's a wonderful interpretation of the end of "Vampyr!" I'm not a fan of "Moby Dick," but I did always like Melville's reading of the horror of endless, indefinite white.
ReplyDeleteI'm really enjoying this series!
-jesse
Thanks, Jesse! I still haven't watched the latest Criterion presentation of "Vampyr," which I hear is far better than any previously released version. I know I gotta get to that! In putting this together, I was surprised by Melville's atheism comment--it's hard to imagine a time when people would have a visceral response to the idea of atheism.
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