I stop reposting from this particular outlet a while ago, but I still make one exception for Carol Rumens’s column, and this time she’s analysing—sublimely as usual—one of my favourite winter poems by Keats.

The title-lines, first: the lack of a hyphen between “drear” and “nighted” adds to the slow weight of the words opening stanzas one and two. Keats’s diction throughout is inventive: he makes bold use of gerunds, or “verbal nouns”, such as “thawings”, “bubblings”, “forgetting”, “fretting”. Each stanza encloses a triad of end-rhymes, consisting, in the first and third, of verb-and-object (“undo them”, “through them”, “glue them” and “feel it”, “heal it” “steel it”). The energy of the rhyme-scheme springs from folk song and folk-speech foundations. ©