The snowplough's buried on the drifted moor.
Carols shake your television
And nothing moved on the road but the wind
Hither and thither
The wind and three
Starving sheep.
Redwings from Norway rattle at the clouds
But comfortless sneezers puddle in pubs.
The robin looks in at the kitchen window
But all care huddles to hearths and kettles.
The sun lobs one wet snowball feebly
Grim and blue
The dusk of the coombe
And the swamp woodland
Sinks with the wren.
See old lips go purple and old brows go paler.
The stiff crow drops in the midnight silence.
Sneezes grow coughs and coughs grow painful.
‘Coombe’ is a variant spelling of ‘combe’, a very old (probably ultimately Celtic) English word meaning ‘valley’. 
 
 English, and English poetry, are full of these old words for aspects of the natural world which now rarely see the light of day. Peter Ackroyd writes about Shakespeare: 
 He was of the country […] Shakespeare has the widest vocabulary on the variety of weeds… disentangling hemlock from cuckoo-flower, the fumiter from the darnal. 
 
 When Hughes started publishing poetry in the early 1950s, Britain was undergoing considerable cultural change, as mass-produced, imported goods became the norm and it seemed as if humans were becoming insulated from the outside. 
 Hughes’s sometimes arcane vocabulary (and  Seamus Heaney ’s after him) is a very deliberate attempt to combat this. An ardent student of Shakespeare (he published the gigantic  Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being  in 1992), he inherits some of the Shakespearean power with the lexicon of nature. 

Christmas Card