Resource: Lines for Winter, by Mark Strand

Print Background Essay

Hoping to comfort a friend or, perhaps, the reader, "Lines for Winter" begins with a bit of advice. "Tell yourself/ as it gets cold and gray falls from the air,/ that you will go on/ walking, hearing/ the same tune no matter where/ you find yourself." The command is firm and his images are unadorned, yet the poem's structure adds drama to these lines. The phrase "go on," for example, connects grammatically to "walking" and "hearing," but, alone at the end of a line, it also suggests the more urgent idea of holding onto life. Likewise, the clause "you find yourself" has a specific meaning within its sentence; isolated on its own line, it takes on new life as an even stronger piece of advice: this is the path to self-discovery.

Concluding this first section, the speaker provides two stark possibilities for where "you" might end up: "inside the dome of dark/ or under the cracking white/ of the moon's gaze in a valley of snow." Despite the soft alliterative "D" sounds, the first image and the personification of the moon, and the internal off-rhyme ("dome / snow") that brings a sense of closure, both images suggest a cold, empty future.

The second section of the poem—its second sentence—starts, "Tonight as it gets cold/ tell yourself." This variation of the opening builds drama by being more specific with time—now you know exactly when it will become cold and life will end: tonight. An artful line break adds tension to the next two lines, where a bleak idea, "what you know which is nothing" turns into a more optimistic suggestion: "but the tune your bones play/ as you keep going." This is the second time the speaker has used the word "tune." First, it was simply a tune to be heard; now it is the music that comes from inside a person, the unique song that defines each of us. Knowing your tune, the poem promises, "you will be able for once to lie down under the small fire/ of winter stars." This is a somber hope, for small fires offer little warmth, yet the phrase "for once" gives the sense that a restless soul might finally find peace.

The poem's third and shortest section begins with a moment of uncertainty. The "if" in the lines, "And if it happens that you cannot/ go on or turn back," tells the reader that eventually you may, no matter what, have to face the cold. This time, the cold is not part of the setting, but "that final flowing of cold through your limbs." This striking image, this powerful reminder that there will be an end, is balanced by the third and final imperative: "tell yourself/ …that you love what you are."

The poem suggests that even a self that struggles to walk or hear (section 1) or even know (section 2) can still love. But is this a truth or just a comforting thing to "tell yourself" in your final moments? The poem can be read both ways, but certainly in love there is comfort, in love there is warmth, and in the self-love the speaker wishes for someone about to die, there seems to be the hope of peace.

Read a biography of the poet Mark Strand at the Poetry Foundation.

Print Teaching Tips

• Strand uses line breaks to add tension, ambiguity of meaning, suspense, and resolution to the poem. To illuminate his use of this device, give your students "Lines for Winter" as a prose paragraph and ask them to break it into lines. Then compare their line breaks to those in Strand's original. What have they added to or taken away from the poem by breaking up the lines differently?
• Only once in this poem does Strand begin a new sentence in the middle of a line. What is the effect? Why might this occur only here?
• For additional line-break exercises, you could compare and contrast Strand's use of the line break to that in Lucille Clifton's "won't you celebrate with me," or have students break up the lines in this excerpt from "A Passage to India" the way that Strand might do it.
• Identify words with strong connotations and discuss what they add to the poem.
• How does the title relate to the poem? What kind of lines might it refer to? Also, beyond simply referring to "death," what might "winter" represent?
• Throughout history, poets have linked the seasons of the year to the stages in human life. Compare Strand's use of winter to how the season appears in the following poems:
  • "When icicles hang by the wall...," from Love's Labors Lost, by William Shakespeare
  • "Now Winter Nights Enlarge...," by Thomas Campion
  • "The Snow Storm," by Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Could you write a response to this poem, maybe one that accepts, rejects, or looks differently at the speaker's advice? (What would your "Lines for Summer" or "Lines for Spring" advise?) Try to use some of Strand's tools—connotation, repetition, and the line break—in your poem.