See, Winter comes to rule the varied year,
Sullen and sad.

I am out of season all years round - watch machinery roar to my empty sound.
Touch my heart and feel winter, hold my hand and be doomed forever.

Another year, another year,—
Alas! and must it be
That Time's most dark and weary wheel
Must turn again for me?

O Winter, ruler of the inverted year!

Perhaps the hardest thing about losing a lover is
to watch the year repeat its days.

He seems very mournful, but there is all the winter still to be survived. He no longer lives in years; he is down to seasons. Finally it will become single nights.

Honest Winter, snow-clad, and with the frosted beard, I can welcome not uncordially; But that long deferment of the calendar's promise, that weeping gloom of March and April, that bitter blast outraging the honour of May how often has it robbed me of heart and hope?

For winter's rains and ruins are over, And all the season of snows and sins; The days dividing lover and lover, The light that loses, the night that wins; And time remembered is grief forgotten, And frosts are slain and flowers begotten, And in green underwood and cover Blossom by blossom the spring begins.

When lilacs last in the door-yard bloomed,
And the great star early drooped in the western sky in the night,
I mourned, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.

"If the first is the year of sorrow," Neil wrote. "The second is the year of emptiness."

Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York;
And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.

All shall be well, I'm telling you, let the winter come and go All shall be well again, I know.

"She turned to the sunlight
And shook her yellow head,
And whispered to her neighbor:
"Winter is dead.

In old age it is no longer possible to credit the sheer, almost physical agony which is caused in youth by the passage of time, when the turning of spring into summer arouses pain as lively as the pain of toothache. The succession of the seasons is like a recurrent inescapable catastrophe, which sweeps away what is young and beautiful, and what is beautiful because it is young.