Nobody in this poem is in a hurry. One friend asks another a simple question, which season do you like best?, and the poem unfolds as a small pastoral conversation, the kind you might imagine between two shepherds resting in the shade. The title credits the ancient Greek poet Bion, so the piece presents itself as drawn from that old tradition, and the antique vocabulary ("asketh," "answereth," "pleaseth," "beseems") keeps up the pretence. What follows is what the text itself shows, and it shows quite a lot.
The questioner is a skilled salesman for all four seasons. Summer is the time "when from harvest toil we rest." Autumn has "glory / Of all surfeited desires." Winter brings "story" and "song" while we "hug our fires." Every season gets a warm, tempting phrase, and spring is saved for the last two lines, almost as an afterthought. The stanza even rhymes its first and last couplets on the same sounds, "true" and "you," so the question closes on the words it opened with.
Myrson's answer is where the humour starts. He begins with great piety: "What the gods in wisdom send / We should question not." Then he spends six lines questioning the gods' work. Summer's sun is "scorching hot." Autumn brings "dire diseases," a cheerless echo of the questioner's "glory." Winter is "biting," and Myrson's "oh!" at the end of a line, tumbling into "ice and snow," sounds like a real shudder. Even his pious word "reverently" sits uncomfortably beside "How I hate." Each of the questioner's cosy pictures is quietly turned upside down, and the formal "perforce I like it not" makes Myrson sound like a dignified man complaining about the weather.
Spring then arrives with a change of mood. "Thrice welcome, kindly spring" is almost a greeting at a door, and "myriad gifts" is generous where the earlier complaints were stingy. Spring's virtue is moderation: "Not too hot nor yet too cold." The best image comes next: spring days are "like the dreaming / Of those nights which love beseems," while its nights "have all the seeming / Of those days of golden dreams." Day and night swap qualities, so the hard edges of the clock soften. The season Myrson loves is one where opposites blur into each other, unlike the harsh extremes of heat and frost. The closing couplet carries this to the whole world: "Heaven smiles down on earth, and then / Earth smiles up to heaven again!" The mirrored phrasing, with "down" answered by "up," makes the exchange of smiles feel like a gentle circle.
The form fits this tone. The lines are short and bounce along in a trochaic beat, stress first, as in "TELL me, MYRson, TELL me TRUE." Many lines have seven syllables and drop the final unstressed beat, so they end on a firm stress, while others, like "Is it autumn with its glory," run to eight and trail off softly. That small variation keeps the rhythm from turning into a nursery chant. All three ten-line stanzas follow roughly the same pattern: two couplets, then an interlocking quatrain (glory / desires / story / fires, or dreaming / beseems / seeming / dreams), then a final couplet that clicks shut. The cross-rhymes in the middle give a little lift before the neat ending. Each stanza sounds like a small song.
The poem is slight, but it is not empty. It turns a casual question about preferences into a quiet argument for balance: the happiest season is the one that goes to neither extreme. It also gets comedy from the gap between Myrson's solemn talk of the gods and his grumbling about heat, sickness and snow. It leaves a feeling of ease, the pleasure of a world in which heaven and earth, day and night, even a question and its answer, fit comfortably together.