WordStage Literary Concerts presents - "WinterWords" - at Lakewood's Wright Chapel - Friday, December 4th at 7:30 PM “Thy breath be rude," William Shakespeare famously told winter in “As You Like It,” invoking a common complaint about the season: winter is cold, windy, bleak, awful. Five centuries later, poets have much the same complaints. Winter’s metaphors often include its stillness, its sense of silence and darkness, a season of hibernation, a season where everything dies a little. The falling snow is a “poem of the air," wrote Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, where the “troubled sky reveals the grief it feels.” Although the long, freezing winter nights and the crisp winter days tend to inspire harsh feelings among the people who endure them, not all poets see winter as a bleak and lifeless season. In Robert Frost’s “Dust of Snow," a crow’s movements cause snow to dust the speaker passing under a tree, and this dust “Has given my heart / A change of mood / And saved some part / Of a day I had rued.” For other poets, the severe winter weather is a chance to speak in defiance of nature. Winter weather also provides many poets with an excuse to turn away from outdoor pastimes and instead to concentrate on renewing and affirming their human relationships. The poem “Now winter nights enlarge” by Thomas Campion, for example, celebrates human warmth amidst chilly weather. Many poets see winter as a fact of the landscape they call home, infusing it with nostalgia. Still others celebrate winter and the joys of the holidays and good cheer it brings. WordStage’s “WinterWords” is a pastiche of all these and more by some of our greatest poets: from Robert Frost, Thomas Hardy, the Emilys Bronte and Dickinson, Robert Louis Stevenson, Walt Whitman and many more – as well as Folk Tales from the Inuit, Native American, Norwegian and Russian Traditions. These texts will be augmented with glittering musical selections the season inspires. Join WordStage Company Members Readers Marci Paolucci and Tim Tavcar, Violinist Mary Beth Ions and Pianist Patrick Wickliffe for an evening of poetry, folk tales and music that will ease you into a wonderful winter season. The Wright Chapel is located in the Lakewood Presbyterian Church - 14502 Detroit Avenue at Marlowe in Downtown Lakewood. Admission is by Free Will Donation. An informal holiday reception will follow the performance. The Wright Chapel is ADA accessible. For more information of this program and other events and presentations being booked for 2016 - please visit our website at www.wordstageoh.com or call us at 216-712-6926. Tim Tavcar