Today’s Poem of the Day — by William Shakespeare (1564–1616), to mark the Ides of January — opens what for many of us will feel like a bleak winter week. The holidays have emphatically ended. Spring seems an eternity away. It’s fitting that we should feature this song from the final act of Shakespeare’s early play, “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” which brings the curtain down on a note, if of not out-and-out disappointment, then at least of joys postponed. 

The dramatic plot is roughly this: A group of earnest noblemen vow to shun the company of women and devote themselves to study. Almost immediately, some ladies from the French court appear, and just as swiftly, the gentlemen are foresworn. Hilarity ensues, largely at the expense of the men, whose will is so readily mastered by desire. Yet just as matters seem to tend toward the resolution which marks such later comedies as “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” with all disorder righted and everybody suitably married, the death of the king of France intervenes. The anticipated marriages must be postponed. The men, so precipitate in their desire, must wait a year to realize its fulfillment. 

All this action culminates in two songs, sung by the buffoonish lover Don Armado. First, Armado sings of the springtime, in which the flowers “paint the meadows with delight,” and “on every tree,” the cuckoo — from whose name the word cuckold derives — mocks married men with its song, hinting at their wives’ infidelity. This song suggests the fool-making consequence of rushing the season.

“Winter,” however, like January itself, settles down to a drearier, but more reassuring, realism. If its nine-line stanzas evoke nothing beautiful, with their ababccddd rhyme scheme and shifting meter, still its stark reality can’t disappoint. “The words of Mercury,” says Armado at the close of the play, “are harsh after the songs of Apollo.” Yet the staring owl’s song, straightforward and un-mocking, still sounds “a merry note,” hopeful in the cheerless cold. 

Winter
by William Shakespeare

When icicles hang by the wall,
    And Dick the shepherd blows his nail,
And Tom bears logs into the hall,
    And milk comes frozen home in pail,
When blood is nipp’d and ways be foul,
Then nightly sings the staring owl,
                Tu-whit;
Tu-who, a merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

When all aloud the wind doth blow,
    And coughing drowns the parson’s saw,
And birds sit brooding in the snow,
    And Marion’s nose looks red and raw,
When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl,
Then nightly sings the staring owl,
                Tu-whit;
Tu-who, a merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.