WHEN winter comes, it brings strange beauty. The world is stripped back to essence and element. The trees are made naked, the contours of the earth revealed under the thin, faded grass. As Shakespeare phrased it in a sonnet, ‘old December’s bareness everywhere!’ Winter is flowerlessness, a countryside reduced to black and white and grey. In the minimalism of winter, the pure art of Nature is rendered visible; the plain architecture of the trees, the mineral hardness of the stars, the recurring geometry of galed wave ridges on the surface of open water.
Desolation is its own beauty, as is the sound of silence. In bleak winter, the ‘very birds are mute,’ continued Shakepeare in Sonnet 97: ‘Or, if they sing, ’tis with so dull a cheer.’ The insects, like the birds, are dumbed; no grasshoppers
