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Verses and Sonnets

Chapter 42: DECEMBER.
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About This Book

This collection assembles sonnets, short lyrics, grotesques and epigrams that shift between playful satire and serious meditation. Poems evoke nocturnal reverie, pastoral songs, seasonal sonnets for each month, and compact narrative sketches, while recurring themes include youth and ageing, love and honour, music and faith, mortality and urban poverty. Formal variety—from polished sonnet sequences to biting epigrams—allows intimate love poems to sit beside comic portraits and moral reflections, producing a compact, varied lyrical volume that alternates tenderness, irony, and moral urgency across domestic, religious, and public scenes.

DECEMBER.

Hoar Time about the house betakes him slow,
Seeking an entry for his weariness;
And in that dreadful company, Distress
And the sad Night with silent footsteps go.
On my poor hearth the brands are scarce aglow,
And in the woods without pale wanderers press;
Where, waning in the pines from less to less,
Mysterious hangs the hornéd moon, and low.
For now December, full of aged care,
Comes in upon the year and weakly grieves,
Mumbling his lost desires and his despair;
And with mad, trembling hand still interweaves
The dank sear flower-stalks tangled in his hair,
While round about him whirl the rotten leaves.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

The cover image for this eBook was created by the transcriber and is entered into the public domain.

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.