Shakespeare's winter song is full of frozen milk, red noses and greasy Joan
Icicles on the wall, a shepherd blowing on his fingers, milk arriving frozen in the pail. Shakespeare's winter song skips grand imagery for a crowded farmhouse kitchen, where coughing drowns out the sermon and crab apples hiss in the bowl. Over it all, an owl hoots a note the poem insists is merry.
The poem is a catalogue of small, exact discomforts. Dick the shepherd blows on his nail to warm it, Tom hauls logs into the hall, and the roads turn foul while blood is nipped by frost. Nobody here is a lord or a lover. They are working people with names as plain as their chores, and the verse moves from one to the next like a camera panning across a village in January.
Each stanza ends with the same refrain. At night the staring owl calls out its tu-whit and tu-who, while greasy Joan keels the pot, an old word for stirring or skimming it so it does not boil over. Calling the owl's cry a merry note is a quiet surprise, since owls often signal gloom in poetry. Here it becomes part of the household soundtrack, as familiar as the bubbling pot.
The second stanza turns up the noise. Wind roars, coughing drowns the parson's saw, meaning his worn-out moralising, birds brood in the snow and Marian's nose is red and raw. Then comes a small pleasure: roasted crabs, the wild apples of English hedges, hissing in a bowl of warm drink. Hardship and comfort sit side by side, and the poem refuses to choose between them.
That eye for rural detail belonged to a boy raised in a Warwickshire market town. Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon and baptised there on 26 April 1564. His father, John, was an alderman and a successful glover who came from the village of Snitterfield, and his mother, Mary Arden, came from a well-off landowning family. William was the third of eight children and the eldest son to survive, which means he grew up in a busy house not unlike the one his song describes.
Source: Winter
