Gerald Bullett's life was marked by war. He served in the First World War for four years in his twenties, and then worked for the BBC in London during the Second World War, in middle life.
Like many authors, the unique insights brought by such terrible exposure gave him a philosophical bent of mind, and a longing for peace, a liking for what came out at times of quiet. This was never far away in his works, either as a major theme, or at the very least consistently present in the background.
Perhaps nowhere was this more the case than in this long poem, first published in 1943. Taking as its temporal locale the very middle of winter, with all the quiet and stillness this predicates, Bullett enters the mental space where the rush and hurry of the world are left behind, and the mind can seek fresh deeper understandings, expanding into a rarely approachable zone.
Taking in creativity, desire, love, pain and the unnameable workings of the spirit, he essays a profound philosophical meditation. That we cannot ultimately say all that perhaps needs to be said, that we are stymied by feelings of powerlessness and of our unimportance when all is said and done - these are to him indicators of the mystery which we will never divine, and perhaps never should.
But also Winter Solstice gives brief glimpses of beauty - of low light and warmth, of snow-covered fallow land and bare trees, of the survival of tiny birds in winter's harshness, but most of all of the value of quiet, and its gift of insight.
