The Best Poetry for Dark Winter Days
For those of us north of the equator, winter officially arrived last week. The early darkness and the chill in the air demand a change in our habits. For many, the season provokes an unmistakable turn inward—toward our warm homes, or the loved ones we see on holidays, or meditative thoughts that, in other times of year, might be crowded out by the light and noise of the world.
Perhaps saying so is sentimental, but these feel like the perfect days and nights for poetry. The form can capture, perhaps better than any other, the muffled quality of cold afternoons and days spent indoors. Its winding paths of language can describe both the season’s comforts and its harsher qualities. As 2025 winds down, we’ve selected some poetry to accompany you through the last days of December. Each collection speaks to a different wintry mood, but all are worth slowing down with before 2026 brings the return of longer, busier days.
Selected Poems of Rubén Darío, translated by Lysander Kemp
Once, after an epiphany in a high-school class, my best friend declared that she had made up her mind to study literature in college. This was years ago, but I remember that day well: She said that analyzing a Darío poem had made her realize how beautiful an arrangement of words can be. Many of his works double as fairy tales, and have been adapted into children’s books. This is why my first exposure to Darío, one of the best poets to ever write in Spanish, came when I was 3 or 4—in the form of a princess story that I love just as much now. My father, too, can recite from memory a Darío verse he read as a young man: “and the neck of the great white swan that questions me.” This volume of Kemp’s translations includes my favorite Darío poems; their rhymes are lost, but their dreamlike, hypnotic quality is preserved. And the sensual images these verses bring to mind—nightingales and angels and silks—make this collection ideal for evenings beside the hearth. — Gisela Salim-Peyer
[Read: What winter-haters get wrong]
Rangikura, by Tayi Tibble
On a snowy day, you could curl up by the fire with something wholesome and cozy; you could perch by the window with something chilly and somber. Or you could crack open the New Zealand poet Tayi Tibble’s Rangikura, which is none of these things. Playful, forceful, and sexy, it radiates so much heat that choosing it for a holiday read is like fleeing south for the winter. (And in Tibble’s home country, December is summer.) That’s not to say it’s unserious: Tibble reflects on the relentless shame she used to feel about her gender and her Indigenous Māori heritage; she charts how she emerged from timidity like flowers peeking out from a melting blanket of ice. Rangikura is the result of her transformation, and it is a persuasive case for freedom, pleasure, and fun that honors the generations of women in her family who also celebrated, shouted, and danced. “I’m hotter than the sun,” she declares. “And my ancestors ride wit me / like dawgs. When I whistle / they run and run and run.” — Faith Hill
Midwinter Day, by Bernadette Mayer
In her diary-like, book-length poem, Midwinter Day, Mayer sets out “to tell the story of exactly what is happening.” The book duly follows a course from her waking hours to the “long black night” of the winter solstice. In the middle of the book, she stops to note the time: “It’s 1:15 pm,” she writes, as she leaves the market. “We’re going home with what we can have to carry. / Having had to pay for it / And the sun comes out.” Mayer isn’t the first author to turn a single day into her plot, but her loving transcription of life in 1978 Lennox, Massachusetts—her children drawing at the kitchen table, their visit to the library, the pattern of snow Mayer sees on a roof, the red brake lights that shine on the wet street—makes a string of ordinary events feel like quiet epiphanies. — Walt Hunter
[Read: The feeling of losing snow]
Was It for This, by Hannah Sullivan
Sullivan’s poems are so long that only six appear in her books. Half of these are in her 2018 debut, Three Poems, and the other half appear in her follow-up, Was It for This, which juxtaposes an elegy for the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire with two gratitude-laced meditations on aging. Throughout, the depth and quality of Sullivan’s attention to prosaic detail—even plain and unappealing objects—never wavers. She lingers on microwavable “corn cobettes”; on a crumbling library book that turns into an “osteoporotic spine / all particles, frayed ribbon, / skin stubs, moving in the / light.” Such appreciative concentration is rare in this era of rush and scrolling, but in “Was It for This,” the collection’s most meditative poem, Sullivan writes, “The things that I instinctively saw as ugly I wanted to see also, under another aspect, as beautiful.” When I read her, I want that too. — Lily Meyer
The Wilderness, by Sandra Lim
Lim’s searching book is best read in complete silence. It rewards the focused, careful turning over of words and phrases. And it is studded with winter imagery: “No clouds toppled across the snow wilderness. / No gloom-dark tree-glitter winding and twining its silks. / Blankness, egg-quiet,” she writes in “Wintering.” This book is dead serious about the human condition, determined to ask existential questions about life and willing to linger in its mysteries. Yet this ambivalence doesn’t show up in Lim’s syntax, which is sure-footed, precise, and vibrant. She begins one poem, “Certainty,” by referencing the Puritan poet Edward Taylor. His verse, she notes, is “full of deep piety, / learned and quiet, but sometimes an errant wildness runs under / the seams of his words.” The same could be said of the poems in Wilderness—they read like a long, slow breath after the crush of a hard year. — Maya Chung
[Read: The Norwegian town where the sun doesn’t rise]
The Bridge, by Hart Crane
How successful is Crane’s modernist epic, a poem meant to stride as confidently across American geography and history as the mighty Brooklyn Bridge spans the East River? Nearly 100 years after its publication, the jury is still out. But even those who consider The Bridge a spectacular failure tend to be impressed by Crane’s ambitions. As T. S. Eliot does in The Waste Land, Crane wants to connect rapid, destabilizing change with mythic currents of emotion. He clasps Walt Whitman’s hand and briskly rouses Rip Van Winkle; all the while, he conjures trains and telegraph wires tearing across the country, buffeted by a hurricane of contemporary references. Making sense of all of this requires measured, deliberate reading, my ideal kind of project for the dead week between Christmas and New Year’s. Helping with this task is a fantastic annotated edition edited by Lawrence Kramer (which is being reissued this spring). Crane was a motivated, but frustrated, visionary. This makes him fascinating—and makes The Bridge worth the trek from promenade to promenade. — Emma Sarappo
The House on Marshland, by Louise Glück
Glück, a Nobel laureate, was a poet of few and careful words. Her work is often described as “spare” or “austere”; a solitary aspect to her poems makes them the perfect companion after an early sunset. Glück often directs her focus toward self-reflection, but her second collection, The House on Marshland, also scrutinizes a stark, chilly natural realm marked by “the barrenness / of harvest or pestilence.” The opening poem, “All Hallows,” is sublimely, high-mindedly eerie, and it is one of my favorites. In later poems, Glück includes plenty of flowering trees and signs of new life, but those are freighted with warning: As she writes of spring, “with the first leaves / all that is deadly enters the world.” Perhaps there’s comfort to be found in the stillness and blankness of winter. — Quinta Jurecic
[Read: Why children are everywhere in Louise Glück’s poetry]
The Complete Poems of John Keats, by John Keats
Some of Keats’s best poems brim with references to the seasons and their attributes, whether a spring musk rose, “mid-May’s eldest child,” or the “mists and mellow fruitfulness” of autumn. But picking up the 19th-century Romantic at the end of the year feels especially apt. That’s because Keats, who died at just 25, was obsessed with the finality of things, with an unavoidable fear of life ceasing to be. Reading him this season can be a humbling reminder of our finitude. And yet, his descriptions of winter’s “pale misfeature” or of “drear nighted December”—its ability to make him wonder, “were there ever any / Writh’d not of passed joy?”—are wildly alive; they suggest that there is much to be gained by reflecting on loss. With this poet, even musings on mortality point toward beauty, no matter the month. — Luis Parrales