Southey opens with a loss. The "musing ear" no longer has the breeze lingering over the green wood, and only after this concession does the sentence arrive at its point: "I love thee Winter! well." Holding back the main clause makes the affection feel chosen rather than automatic. The poem is working to persuade itself, and us, that winter has something to give.
The second stanza sets up the contrast. Spring has its "harmonies", summer its "evening gale", autumn its winds shaking the "many-colour'd grove". Every pleasure is a sound. Winter offers "the silence of the wintry scene", and from there the poem hands the work of perceiving to the eye. Heaths are "sparkling on the sight", branches are "spangled", berries "claim the eye", and the frozen landscape is a "silvery scene". The central idea is that winter is a change of sense and mood rather than a deprivation. The poem goes on to argue that the season's apparent death is only a pause.
The form supports this. The stanzas are quatrains without rhyme, and most follow a clear pattern: three lines of eight syllables, then a shorter line of six. The short line acts like an exhale. It closes the thought quietly: "I love thee Winter! well," "The many-colour'd grove," "Endures calamity." Rhyme would have jingled against so much talk of silence, and the plain, unrhymed lines suit a poem about stillness. The third stanza, as printed here, has only three lines, and its sentence hangs open on "her trance." Whether by design or accident, the poem seems to fall silent in the very stanza that praises silence.
Southey's tone is understated. He doesn't say winter is delightful; he says it is "Not undelightful", twice, as he walks the heath and paces "the forest's ample rounds." The double negative is cautious and a little reluctant, like someone admitting a pleasure he expected to be denied. The word "now" keeps recurring ("now no more," "not undelightful now," "nor void of beauties now"), which pins the poem to the present moment its title announces, the first of December, on the threshold of the cold months.
The most deliberate image is the ivy that "Clasps its full foliage close" round the leafless oak. Southey turns it at once into a moral comparison: "So VIRTUE diffident of strength / Clings to RELIGION'S firmer aid." The capitalised abstractions feel stiff beside the vivid description around them. Still, the image carries the argument. Against the bare oak, the ivy's green looks brighter, and the bare tree becomes a support rather than a ruin.
The poem also has a harder edge. The moss shines "with icey glare," the grass bends "its spear-like form," and the sunbeams only "faintly smile." Winter's beauty is brittle and sharp, and it comes with a little menace. The line about the spring, in the sense of a water source, is the poem's most interesting moment. Its waters, "hid from summer sun," have soothed "the thirsty pilgrim's ear / With more than melody." Thirst is relieved through hearing, so the lost sounds of the earlier seasons return in a new form. The lowercase "spring" here also quietly prepares the capitalised "Spring" of the finale.
That finale is the poem's neatest trick. In the penultimate stanza, Nature is "hid in Winter's grave" and "No more expands the bursting bud / Or bids the flowret bloom." The last stanza repeats nearly the same words with the negatives removed: Nature will "rise reviv'd from Winter's grave. / Again expand the bursting bud, / And bid the flowret bloom." The repetition enacts the resurrection it promises. The same lines that spoke of death come back with new life in them, just as spring will bring back what winter took.
This is a modest poem, but its interest lies in that modesty. It trains attention on what is easy to overlook in a bleak season, such as moss on a grey stone, holly berries and a thread of ivy. It also shows how a poem's structure can carry its meaning, so that the final stanza reads as a quiet rebirth of the one before it.