D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930), the English novelist and poet, wrote “A Winter’s Tale” in the charged period around the First World War; it appeared in his 1916 collection *Amores*. Though Lawrence is often remembered for the bold psychology of his fiction, these early lyrics show how sharply he could compress emotional crisis into landscape. The poem opens on a frozen scene that is already disappearing under new snow: “Yesterday the fields were only grey with scattered snow, / And now the longest grass-leaves hardly emerge.” That single detail, the grass-leaves, suggests a world on the edge of being buried, where even the hardiest life is nearly invisible.
The speaker follows a woman’s footprints across this whitening field. Her “deep footsteps mark the snow, and go / On towards the pines at the hills’ white verge.” The path makes her present even before she can be seen; the marks are deep, as if her waiting and her walking have weight. At the same time, the landscape refuses clarity. The “mist’s white scarf” wraps the dark wood and the “dull orange sky,” so that the speaker can only infer her from the trail she has left. That phrase “white scarf” is unexpectedly intimate, a cold garment pressed over the whole scene, hiding whatever warmth the orange sky might offer.
Lawrence builds the poem as three quatrains with alternating rhyme, but the rhythm is deliberately uneven. The first line stretches beyond the others, as if the words themselves are wading through snow, while the line-break in “half / Sobs” makes the woman’s distress catch in the poem’s breath. She is “impatient and cold,” and her sigh is “frosty,” so her inner state is indistinguishable from the weather. The speaker cannot see her, yet he knows exactly what she is feeling. That knowledge is more troubling than sight would be: he carries the news of an “inevitable farewell,” and her eagerness only brings her closer to the wound she seems to expect.
The final stanza turns on the repeated question, “Why does she come so promptly, when she must know...?” The question is not really about her decision; it is an expression of the speaker’s own anguish at being slow. The hill is steep, the snow slows his steps, and the word “slow” lands heavily against the earlier “promptly” and “impatient.” The rhyme of “know” and “slow” links understanding with hesitation, while “farewell” and “tell” connect the act of speaking to loss. The speaker is not merely late; he is delayed by the same snow that records the woman’s progress, and the landscape becomes a space of moral and emotional difficulty rather than a simple backdrop.
What makes “A Winter’s Tale” significant is its refusal to explain the farewell. Lawrence gives no reason for the parting, no backstory, no resolution. The poem holds the reader in the same suspended cold as the speaker, watching a figure disappear toward a white verge and knowing that the meeting will be painful. The “tale” is not a narrative event but the long approach to one. In this way, the winter setting becomes more than atmosphere: it is a psychological map of distance, concealment, and the strange compulsion to move toward what one dreads. The poem’s power lies in that unanswered final question, which lingers like breath in cold air.