A Christmas gift

The quiet magic in frost and poetry - and a Christmas discount

‘First, frost at midnight —

Ice, like a cold key,

turning its lock on the lake;

nervous stars trapped there.’

It’s Christmas Eve, 1799, and Dorothy Wordsworth is awake. The morning will bring the double joy of her birthday and Christmas.

There will be a surprise visitor, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, swigging port wine and making his way through the dawn to Dorothy and her brother, William, who will rise late, and skate ‘like a boy’ on Grasmere’s frozen lake.

Dorothy Wordsworth’s Christmas Birthday is a beautiful little Christmas poem written by Carol Ann Duffy and illustrated by Tom Duxbury.

It would make a gorgeous stocking filler for the literary love of your life.

‘…a tame robin,

aflame on the windowsill,

its name in its song.’

---

In a BBC Masterclass led by Carol Ann Duffy, she outlined her process for creating and refining a poem. One of her redrafting stages is to check the verbs she’s used. She says,

‘I think of the verb in a line of poetry as a battery. It gives the poem energy or light. Very often the first verb we select will be the lazy or obvious one.’

She gave the example of a poem she wrote called The Christmas Truce. It’s about soldiers on both sides in the First World War, who have arranged to play a football match on Christmas Day. On Christmas Eve, though, the soldiers need to bring the bodies back that lie in No Man’s Land, the space between the two armies.

Duffy used the word ‘rime’ to refer to the frost that night:

‘Glittering rime on unburied sons has frozen stiff their hair.’

As she went through all the verbs, she picked out the word ‘frozen’ and changed it to ‘treasured’:

‘Glittering rime on unburied sons treasured their stiff hair.’

She says:

‘That was a piece of poetic luck that came out of redrafting. Those boys couldn’t be treasured. No one could stroke their hair. So it’s a bleak and poignant image but equally, because of the ice and moonlight, their hair was silver and sparkled.

To me it signified that those boys would also always be treasured. With just one verb the line is transformed and with its battery-burst of energy, that line transforms the whole verse, the whole poem.’

I leave you with these two Christmas gifts from our former Poet Laureate: a literary poem from the Lake District, and a transformative grammatical treasure.

And as a little Christmas gift from me to you, I’m offering a 50% discount to Wild Writing with Sanjida, for you. It’ll be available for 10 days, until 1 January ( £25 a year or 7p per day). 🎁

Thank you for reading and commenting during this past year. I’ve loved every minute of writing and talking with you.

Happy Christmas, happy holidays and Happy New Year.

See you in January!

Sanjida x