Cold in your bones

After my latest excursion to Harbin (not nearly as cold as the first one 3 years ago, but plenty cold enough when exposed to the penetrating wind), I have been brooding on the effects of prolonged extreme cold, both on the physiology and the emotions. I confess, I do get rather spooked by it (there were several times in the last few days when, after incautiously snapping away with my camera for too long in the biting wind, gloveless or with inadequate gloves, my hands were in so much pain I really thought I might have given myself early-stage frostbite).

Strangely enough, there don't seem to be too many poems about frostbite - apart from the Yukon ballads of Robert Service, perhaps. This, however, is a great poem on the experience of hypothermia: one of Wilfred Owen's somewhat lesser-known First War poems, one of my favourites. There are so many wonderful lines in this: I particularly like "Dawn, massing in the east her melancholy army..."

Exposure


I


Our brains ache, in the merciless iced east winds that knive us....
Wearied, we keep awake because the night is silent....
Low drooping flares confuse our memory of the salient....
Worried by silence, sentries whisper, curious, nervous,
But nothing happens.


Watching, we hear the mad gusts tugging on the wire
Like twitching agonies of men among its brambles.
Northward, incessantly, the flickering gunnery rumbles,
Far off, like a dull rumour of some other war.
What are we doing here?


The poignant misery of dawn begins to grow....
We only know war lasts, rain soaks, and clouds sag stormy.
Dawn, massing in the east her melancholy army,
Attacks once more in ranks on shivering ranks of gray,
But nothing happens.


Sudden successive flights of bullets streak the silence,
Less deadly than the air that shudders black with snow,
With sidelong flowing flakes that flock, pause and renew.
We watch them wandering up and down the wind's nonchalance,
But nothing happens.




II


Pale flakes with lingering stealth come feeling for our faces.
We cringe in holes, back on forgotten dreams, and stare, snow-dazed,
Deep into grassier ditches. So we drowse, sun-dozed,
Littered with blossoms trickling where the blackbird fusses.
Is it that we are dying?


Slowly our ghosts drag home: glimpsing the sunk fires glozed
With crusted dark-red jewels; crickets jingle there;
For hours the innocent mice rejoice: the house is theirs;
Shutters and doors all closed: on us the doors are closed -
We turn back to our dying.


Since we believe not otherwise can kind fires burn,
Nor ever suns smile true on child, or field, or fruit,
For God's invincible Spring our love is made afraid;
Therefore, not loath, we lie out here; therefore were born;
For love of God seems dying.


Tonight, His frost will fasten on this mud and us,
Shrivelling many hands and puckering foreheads crisp.
The burying-party, picks and shovels in their shaking grasp,
Pause over half-known faces. All their eyes are ice,
But nothing happens.


Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)