In The Bleak Midwinter

Source: NOAA

Liz's grandfather worked the old codfishing schooner fleet out of Boston and Gloucester, Massachusetts, hauling lines in the little doryboats on what was once the richest fishing grounds in the world. There's video of Portugese dory fishermen here. The only deliberate falsehood I introduced is Liz's mother's birth order; she was next-to-youngest but that didn't scan. I shouldn't have changed it but there it is. Both her sister and she are gone now. There are lots of intimations of death here -- the sound of a churchbell heard in a boat, "the bed made long and narrow" which is the coffin from the old folksong "Barbara Allen."


The casting of flowers into Gloucester harbor to remember the dead is a real thing with a long history, as this article from 1903 shows and is also shown at the end of the film "Captains Courageous" from which the screenshot below is taken.

The title comes from Christina Rossetti's poem of course, and there are several settings of it into music; the one that mattered most to me was the Gustav Holst setting recorded by Jane Siberry, Mary Margaret O'Hara, Victoria Williams, Holly Cole and Rebecca Jenkins, which you can hear here. Jane also recorded it on her record, Child, which Jane provides on a pay-as-you-ought basis here. "Snow had fallen snow on snow..."

In the Bleak Midwinter

Two thousand hooks along each line, and hooked
On each a herring split by men who wrap
Their feet in newspapers first and then in socks.

Over the starboard side he drops to follow
His dorymate from the schooner down into
The waiting boat. Silent as salt the two row

Out into the waiting Georges Bank, gowned
By mist and the rising morning, snowflakes fall,
Rest for a moment, then drown.

He cranks the gurdy at the first trawl line –
The barbed cod rise wreathed in thrash and foam.
He cocks his head as though to listen.

The night before, he doesn’t know, his youngest
Woke after midnight to press her face
Against the windowpane, clouded by a gust

Of warm breath, her fingertips trace alive
A ship, the waves. You know he never learned
To swim, she will tell her own daughters, my wife.

On that night in her mind’s eye she saw people
Moving from the church, a lantern before his boat,
A light like a bell sounding softly in the steeple,

Calling Christmas is coming, is coming, while conch
Horns blew in the fog, as geese call to one another,
As gutted fish fall into the salthold, as a knock

Of hands on wood, the bed made long and narrow.
Such is faith. How easy it is to call on the god
Who leafs the daffodil, gives song to the sparrow.

But you are asked instead to praise the bloody knife,
To trust frail petals tossed into the harbor,
Step out, and walk across the water to your life.

(Published The Baltimore Review Vol. 8 no. 1, Winter/Spring 2004)