Flowers For Socrates

by NONA BLYTH CLOUD

In the Northern Hemisphere, we are just a day past the longest night of the year, and now the sun will linger moments longer each day until the Summer Solstice. The tides of the seasons never cease their ebb and flow, always lighting long days for those under the Southern Cross when the Northern Lights dance in our dark winter sky.

There are few poets who haven’t written something about the seasons, which mark the passage of time, and have been used for centuries as metaphors for the growing up and growing old of humans.

Here are poems on this eternal theme from four very different English-language poets. First up, the most famous and admired poet of them all, William Shakespeare (1564-1616), comparing separation from his “Thee” to a winter blight in the midst of summer.

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Sonnet 97: How like a winter hath my absence been

How like a winter hath my absence been
From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!
What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen!
What old December’s bareness everywhere!
And yet this time remov’d was summer’s time,
The teeming autumn, big with rich increase,
Bearing the wanton burthen of the prime,
Like widow’d wombs after their lords’ decease:
Yet this abundant issue seem’d to me
But hope of orphans and unfather’d fruit;
For summer and his pleasures wait on thee,
And thou away, the very birds are mute;
Or if they sing, ’tis with so dull a cheer
That leaves look pale, dreading the winter’s near.

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