Shakespeare, William. Winter Song. Illus. Melanie Hall. Wordsong, Honesdale, PA, 2006.
This is a single illustrated song from William Shakespeare’s Love’s Labor’s Lost. The song describes life in wintry England. Scenes of kitchen life, religious attendance, feasting and festivities are depicted.
The color palette of the artwork suggests winter’s cold with its whites, pale blues and dark blues. Speckles of white symbolize snow. Interior house scenes glow with orange and red warm colors. The scrubbed effect of paint and chalk on rough paper gives the pictures texture. The overall effect is very impressionistic. Some of the text is given an artistic treatment that suggests icicles through its angularity in the initial letter of each line of verse. The artwork definitely helps tell the story of the song.
This book would be best introduced to ages nine and up. Although, the book includes a glossary in the back, most children would find this poem more challenging than many that they are used to. This is an age where children have the ability to enjoy word play, puzzles and secret codes.
An extension to this poem would be to rewrite a winter poem in the child’s own natural language and then to illustrate it and capture the wintry mood of the poem.