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# Weekend Words: Freeze
- URL: https://hyperallergic.com/weekend-words-freeze/
- Published: 2014-01-12T16:45:36.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-24T16:34:01.000Z
- Description: "Polar Vortex" — nothing else needs to be said.
- Author: Weekend Editors
- Tags: Opinion, Weekend, Weekend Words, #wp, #wp-post, #image-position-hidden, #Import 2025-11-24 07:03 (2014, 2015, part 1)

![freeze](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2014/01/freeze.jpg)

Aert van der Neer, “Sports on a Frozen River” (c.1660). Oil on wood, 23 x 35 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. (Image via Web Gallery of Art)

“Polar Vortex” — nothing else needs to be said.

> “This is the hour of Lead—  
> Remembered, if outlived,  
> As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow—  
> First—Chill—then stupor—then the letting go.”  
>  
> **—Emily Dickinson, “After great pain, a formal feeling comes”**

> “Freeze, freeze, thou bitter sky,  
> That dost not bite so nigh  
> As benefits forgot:  
> Though thou the waters warp,  
> Thy sting is not so sharp  
> As friend remembered not.”  
>  
> **—Shakespeare, *King Lear***

> “Tut, tut! thou art all ice, thy kindness freezes:  
> Say, have I thy consent that they shall die?”  
>  
> **—William Shakespeare, *Richard III***

> “A widow bird sat mourning for her love  
> Upon a wintry bough;  
> The frozen wind crept on above,  
> The freezing stream below.”  
>  
> **—Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Charles the First”**

> “The quality of the imagination is to flow and not to freeze.”  
>  
> **—Ralph Waldo Emerson**

> “The television, that insidious beast, that Medusa which freezes a billion people to stone every night, staring fixedly, that Siren which called and sang and promised so much and gave, after all, so little.”  
>  
> **—Ray Bradbury**

> “People praise virtue, but they hate it, they run away from it. It freezes you to death, and in this world you’ve got to keep your feet warm.”  
>  
> **—Denis Diderot**