FOR my annual January dip into the poetry of Robert Burns, I found myself reading his celebrated poem “To a Mouse” aloud, and thus really tasting the words, savouring the sounds, getting the full pungency of his Scots dialect. I can’t recite it as well as my mother, a true Scotswoman, used to do each year, but I give it a try in her memory.

What struck me this time round was the vivid accuracy of the descriptions of bleak winter weather in words that sound like, and almost embody, the severity that they denote: “An’ bleak December’s win’s ensuing, Baith snell an’ keen!”

“Snell” is such a telling word — I can feel the wind whistling through me as I say it. It carries so much meaning that the Dictionaries of the Scots Language use five separate English words just to give a sense of it: “biting, keen, piercing, bitter, severe”.

And then, a little later in the poem, as Burns thinks of the poor mouse turned out to face the elements like some evicted crofter, he says:

Now thou’s turned out, for a’ thy trouble,
But house or hald,
To thole the Winter’s sleety dribble,
An’ cranreuch cauld!

There’s such rich language in that verse: “Thole” carries much more of grim determination than its Latinate English equivalent, “endure”. “Sleety dribble” is a phrase that we have retained in English for the very good reason that we often need it, but we have no exact equivalent of “cranreuch”. Here, the Scots has retained an originally Gaelic term, crann reodhach, “frosty tree”: a poetic suggestion of the branching crystals of hoar-frost, although cran also means to shrink or shrivel, which adds to the sense of the bleak and cold, picked up by Burns in following “cranreuch” with “cauld”. But it’s the sound of the word “cranreuch” which carries so much more of the experience of the crinkling crunching of frost beneath one’s feet than our term, hoar-frost.

English poets, though, are also more than capable of giving us the bleak winter soundscape, as well as the outer descriptions of its weather. In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (the fine Middle English poem, not the execrable film), there’s a wonderful description of the weather as Gawain journeys north to meet his fate and keep his tryst with the Green Knight, when the poet says that the weather was a far worse enemy than any warfare:

For werre wrathed hym not so much þat wynter nas wors,
When þe colde cler water fro þe cloudez schadde,
And fres er hit falle my?t to þe fale erþe;
Ner slayn wyth þe slete he sleped in his yrnes.

Jessie Weston renders this in modern English as: “Yet he cared not so much for the strife, what he deemed worse was when the cold clear water was shed from the clouds and froze ere it fell on the fallow ground. More nights than enough he slept in his harness on the bare rocks, near slain with the sleet.” This keeps some of the memorable phrases, such as “slain with the sleet”, but misses the simple concentrated alliterative pungency of “winter was worse”.

As I step out into a dreich January day, its winds flinging freezing sleet into my face, I’m glad to have such a word-hoard to call upon, to know that I am not the only poet to have trudged through the “cranreuch cauld” or to feel that he is being “slayn with the slete”.