Winter

There is a common complaint about the season: winter is cold, windy, bleak, awful. Winter's metaphors often include its stillness, its sense of silence and darkness, a season of hibernation, a season where everything dies a little. The falling snow is a "poem of the air", wrote Longfellow, where the "troubled sky reveals the grief it feels". Updike noted winter's lack of sunlight, writing in "January":

The days are short, 
The sun a spark 
Hung thin between 
The dark and dark

Although the long, freezing winter nights, and the crisp winter days tend to inspire harsh feelings among the people who endure them, not everyone sees winter as a bleak and lifeless season.