Nature, Place and Season

Poetry · Poem

WHEN daisies pied and violets blue

William Shakespeare · English Renaissance

Spring flowers, shepherds' pipes, mating birds and bleaching maidens fill the fields while the cuckoo's repeated call is heard as mockery of married men.

诗 Poetry · Poem

WHEN icicles hang by the wall

William Shakespeare · English Renaissance

Winter cold, frozen milk, foul roads, wind and coughing are set against the owl's nightly cry, which the refrain calls a merry note while Joan keels the pot.

诗 Poetry · Poem

Under the Greenwood Tree

William Shakespeare · English Renaissance

Two stanzas invite anyone who shuns ambition and is content with what he finds to join the singer in the forest, where the only enemy is rough weather, and a third stanza mockingly answers that whoever leaves wealth and ease for this is a fool.

诗 Poetry · Poem

Hymn to Diana

Ben Jonson · English Renaissance

A hymn asks the huntress-goddess to keep her state now the sun has set, forbids the earth's shade to interpose, and asks her to lay bow and quiver aside and give the hunted hart space to breathe.

诗 Poetry · Poem

To Violets

Robert Herrick · Seventeenth-century English

Violets are greeted as maids of honour who bring in the spring and are ranked ahead of the damask roses, until the last stanza notes that they will shortly lie neglected.

诗 Poetry · Poem

To Blossoms

Robert Herrick · Seventeenth-century English

Addressing blossoms falling too fast from a fruit tree, the speaker asks why they were made for an hour's delight and then reads in them how quickly showy things pass into the grave.

诗 Poetry · Poem

The Grasshopper

Richard Lovelace · Seventeenth-century English

The poem addresses a grasshopper swinging on an oat-beard, drunk nightly on dew, owner of earth and air by turns, who retires to a carved acorn-bed and wakes to greet the sun and make men merry.

诗 Poetry · Poem

To Spring

William Blake · English Romanticism

An address to Spring, urging the season to turn its eyes on the western isle, come over the eastern hills, and adorn a land described as lovesick and mourning in its absence.

诗 Poetry · Poem

Stanzas

John Keats · English Romanticism

In a December night the tree and the brook are called happy because they cannot remember their green summer, while human beings, who writhe at past joy, must know and feel the change with nothing to heal it—a state the poem says was never said in rhyme.

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