High Falcon & Other Poems/Winter Solstice

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WINTER SOLSTICE
December, mortal season, crustsThe dark snows shuffled in the street,And rims the lamp with sleet.The beggar, houseless, chill, and thin,Leans to the chestnut vendor's coals,The cart creaks off which trails the winter bush,And the thick night shuts in.
Prepare the sun his bier,The sun, the fallen year,With all the spoil it yields,For their fresh almanach is shrunk and dry.Those pheasants whose proud treadMade royal summer fieldsHang speckled crop to crop,And strung before the gamester's shopThe hare stares out with frozen eye.
O festival most rich,Converting dead times green,Which from bare forests plucksThe circumspect bright bushThat burnt among the boughs blackened and thinned.The bright unwithered leaf that none had seenBefore both leaf and burr were trodden down,And the wild summer streamed upon the wind.
The sun declines in pride,The year draws underground. ​With much beside.The flesh which has survived,Outlived its times' defeat,Rides now the skeleton,Secure by what is gone,To taste a pious meat.How should that other praise,Whose loss does not corrupt,The triumph of its days?See this—that hadNot more than breath in mind—The mortal, feasts unblanchedAmong a dying kind.Then, spirit, if you mustGive a more lasting forfeit than the dustThat owes but to the West,Reflect, a more entire estateIs of such charge possessed,And lordly calendars its progress show.For that sun's course which measured the extentOf so much treasurable worthSaw your goods tried, not spent.You scorned to hold of time, and soGet not time's rate,But sign aloneThe payment without date.Its little tithe must cost the dust as dear,That, ringed with death,Makes its own mock in this late wreath,A twelvemonth green, and in the binding sere.
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