Southey's "Winter" begins by describing the figure everyone already knows, then tells the artists they got him wrong. The "they" of the first line are the painters and storytellers who made the season into a person: a "wrinkled crabbed man" trudging through bad weather. The poem accepts that picture for six lines and then rejects it. Its central idea is that winter looks bleak only from outside. Seen from indoors, it is the season of company, stories and warmth.
The first portrait is built from hard, cold details. The beard is "as grey / As the long moss upon the apple-tree", a comparison that makes Winter look like the bare orchard in January. The face is all chill: "Blue-lipt, an icedrop at thy sharp blue nose". Notice how "blue" is repeated and how the three heavy words "sharp blue nose" crowd together, so the line itself feels pinched. The sixth line is the loneliest. "Plodding alone through sleet and drifting snows" opens with a heavy beat, and its long vowels in "alone", "through" and "snows" slow it to a trudge. Everything here is solitary and shut in, with Winter "close muffled up" against the weather.
Then comes the turn: "They should have drawn thee by the high-heapt hearth". The word "drawn" matters, because the poet now becomes the painter and offers a better picture. The key words change with it. "Hearth", "chair" and "mirth" replace sleet and snow, and the soft, rounded sounds of "high-heapt hearth" and "great armed chair" are as cosy as the scene they describe. Winter is no longer alone. He is "circled" by children, and his "lips declare" a jest or a story. Even the frightening material has been tamed. A "tale of murder dire" and a "troubled spirit that disturbs the night" are what the old man tells, not what he does, so the dark outside becomes entertainment inside. Winter turns into a grandfather who knows how to make a long evening enjoyable.
The ending adds more senses. The first half is mostly sight and cold touch, but the last lines bring in sound (the storytelling) and taste. "Pausing at times to rouse the mouldering fire" is a small, domestic action, and the line itself pauses, since "Pausing" opens it with a stress. The final line, "Or taste the old October brown and bright", most likely refers to ale brewed in October, judging by "taste" and "brown and bright". The poem ends on a mouthful of something warm and amber, far from the icedrop where it began. The word "old" has also changed. In the first portrait "Old Winter" sounds worn out, but by the end it sounds like "old friend" or "old ale", something mellowed by age.
The form supports this change of mind. The poem has fourteen lines, the length of a sonnet, but it does not follow a sonnet's usual plan. The rhyme scheme runs ABACBC, then DEDEFGFG, so the first part is six lines and the second eight, the reverse of the traditional split. The rhymes also loosen in the first part, where "nose" and "snows" are separated from "grey" and "way" by interleaving. In the second part, "hearth/mirth", "chair/declare", "dire/fire" and "night/bright" settle into a tidier pattern. The metre is mostly iambic pentameter, with occasional trochaic openings ("Plodding", "Pausing") that give the lines weight where the sense needs it. It is tempting to read the broken sonnet shape as part of the poem's argument, a refusal of the expected pattern, though that is an inference from the text rather than something the poem states.
The poem matters because it shows, in a small space, how personification can be revised. Calling a season "Old Winter" and giving it a beard is a very old habit, and Southey keeps it but changes the character it produces. In doing so he points out that an image is a choice, and that a gloomier season can be redrawn as a welcoming one. By the last line the reader has been moved indoors and given a seat by the fire.