Just before the concluding lines of his comedy Love's Labour's Lost, Shakespeare includes a pair of songs, "Winter" and "Spring," that are nearly identical in form, length, and meter yet as opposite in imagery as the seasons denoted in their titles. Each two-stanza lyric has the refrain of a bird's song and the mood engendered in the humans who listen to the serenade. Ironically, those contrasting moods are unexpected and in opposition to the sorts of images that lead up to them.

Here is the first verse of "Winter."

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, to-who!"

A merry note,

While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

The Dick, Tom and Joan of the above are of the servant class as their nicknames indicate. None of the images are suggestive of things cozy and comfortable. Icicles are attractive in the artwork of Currier and Ives but not when you're out among them in 16th-century England as are Dick and Tom.

Dick blows on his numb fingers to warm them. The cows' milk freezes in the pail between barn and house because of the chill temperature. The "nipp'd" blood does not refer to the shedding or drinking of the life source but to the painful feelings occasioned by bumps and other contact of our flesh in extremely cold weather. Roads are muddied, Joan is greasy from her labors at the cook stove while she skims the surfaced fat from the pot.

Surprisingly, the song of the night owl that we often associate with mournfulness is "a merry note."

Consider the similarities of stanza two. (I'll omit the three-line refrain in the interest of space saving.)

When all aloud the wind doth blow,

And coughing drowns the parson's saw,

And birds sit brooding in the snow,

And Marian's nose looks red and raw,

When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl,

Then nightly sings the staring owl . . .

Wintry blasts compound the chill factor. Churchgoers are afflicted with coughs that drown out the parson's homily, but no one misses much since the sermon, referred to as a "saw" or a speech of hackneyed repetition, is something all have heard before. Reference to the redness and rawness of Marian's nose is a most unpoetic piece of description. Other birds sit "brooding in the snow;" the first word importing the double denotation of sorrowful mood and birds sitting on eggs.

But don't despair. Tom has hauled in wood for

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