January

COLD January comes in Winter's car,

Thick hung with icicles--its heavy wheels

Cumbered with clogging snow, which cracks and peels

With its least motion or concussive jar

'Gainst hard hid ruts, or hewn trees buried far

In the heaped whiteness which awhile conceals

The green and pastoral earth. Old Christmas feels,--

That well-fed and wine-reeling wassailer,--

With all his feasts and fires, feels cold and shivers,

And the red runnel of his indolent blood

Creeps slow and curdled as a northern flood.

And lakes and winter-rills, impetuous rivers

And headlong cataracts, are in silence bound,

Like trammelled tigers lashed to th'unyielding ground.

Cornelius Webb

March

[Ed. Note: The story of Una and the lion in lines 1-6 is from Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I, Canto III. --Nelson]

LIKE as that lion through the green woods came,

With roar which startled the hushed solitudes,

Yet, soon as he saw Una, that white dame

To Virtue wedded, quieted his rude

And savage heart, and at her feet fell tame

As a pet lamb,--so March, though his first mood

Was boisterous and wild, feeling that shame

Would follow his fell steps, if Spring's young brood

Of buds and blossoms withered where he trod,--

Calmed his fierce ire. And now both violets

Breathe their new lives; the tawny primrose sits

Like squatted gypsy on the wayside clod;

And early bees are all day on the wing,

And work like labour, yet like pleasure sing.

Cornelius Webb