March - John Clare

The entirety of this poem is quite long, so here is a selection for the season of the year!

from March

March, month of "many weathers", wildly comes
In hail and snow and rain and threatening hums
And floods -- while often at his cottage-door
The shepherd stands to hear the distant roar
Loosed from the rushing mills and river-locks
With thundering sound and overpowering shocks.
From bank to bank along the meadow lea
The river spreads and shines a little sea,
While in the pale sunlight a watery brood
Of swopping white birds flock about the flood.
[...]
The shepherd-boy, that hastens now and then
From hail and snow beneath his sheltering den
Of flags or file-leaved sedges tied in sheaves
Or stubble shocks, oft as his eye perceives
Sun-threads shrink out in momentary smiles,
With fancy thoughts his loneliness beguiles,
Thinking the struggling winter hourly by,
As down the edges of the distant sky
The hailstorm sweeps -- and while he stops to strip
The stooping hedge-briar of its lingering hip,
He hears the wild geese gabble o'er his head,
Then, pleased with fancies in his musings bred,
He marks the figured forms in which they fly
And pausing, follows with a wondering eye,
Likening their curious march in curves or rows
To every letter which his memory knows,
While, far above, the solitary crane
Swings lonely to unfrozen dykes again,
Cranking a jarring melancholy cry
Through the wild journey of the cheerless sky.