Once there had been joy, but now there was only sadness, and it was not, he knew, alone the sadness of an empty house; it was the sadness of all else, the sadness of the Earth, the sadness of the failures and the empty triumphs.

Ah, woe is me! Winter is come and gone, But grief returns with the revolving year.

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

In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.

This is the year which people will talk about
This is the year which people will be silent about.<p>The old see the young die.
The foolish see the wise die.<p>The earth no longer produces, it devours.
The sky hurls down no rain, only iron.

Aroysgevorfne yorn (“years”), enunciated with a sigh deep from the diaphragm, or with bitterness, refers to the wasted years that can never be relived.

Sad, sad to think that the year is all but done.

The one without second is emptiness, the other one makes it true.

God, how pointless and empty the world is! Days filled with cheap and tarnished moments succeed each other, restless and haunted nights follow in bitter routine: the sun shines without brightness, and the moon rises without light.

These are the desolate, dark weeks when nature in its barrenness equals the stupidity of man. The year plunges into night and the heart plunges lower than night

The melancholy days are come, the saddest of the year, Of wailing winds, and naked woods, and meadows brown and sere.

Emptiness empties the one seeing into what is seen.

The poet Yeats felt we were living in the last of a great Christian cycle. His poem “The Second Coming” says, “Turning and turning in the widening gyre/The falcon cannot hear the falconer;/Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,/The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/The ceremony of innocence is drowned.

Futile bitterness, idle melancholy, empty regrets.