Shelley sets up a funeral and then refuses to let anyone believe in it. "Dirge for the Year" has mourners, a coffin, a shroud, a sexton and a bier, yet the whole procession is arranged to show that nobody has really died. The Year is "but asleep", and the poem's task is to turn its mourners from weeping into waiting.
Those mourners, the Hours, are the poem's most interesting invention. Shelley treats them as children: "Orphan Hours", "Merry Hours", "Solemn Hours", "Trembling Hours". Each stanza gives them a new mood and a new instruction, like an adult steering frightened children through a bewildering day. Because the Year is their mother, the grief on offer is a child's grief, and the comfort is the kind children get: she is only sleeping. The first stanza even has the dead Year smiling "as it is sleeping, / Mocking your untimely weeping". "Untimely" is the key word. The Hours' tears are not wrong so much as premature.
The middle stanzas turn on one repeated action, rocking. In the second, an earthquake "rocks a corse / In its coffin in the clay", and "White Winter, that rough nurse" does the same to the "death-cold Year". In the third, the wind stirs "the tree-swung cradle of a child", and "the breath of these rude days / Rocks the Year". The motion is the same, but the first picture is violent and the second is a lullaby. Shelley is showing that one event can be read as desecration or as comfort, depending on whether you expect a waking. The Year also changes roles. In stanza two she is the mother "in her shroud", and in stanza three she is the baby in the cradle. Parent and child merge, which suggests a cycle rather than an ending.
The form supports this reassurance. Each of the four stanzas has six short lines rhymed ABABCC, and the closing couplet is where the poem speaks most plainly: "Mocking your untimely weeping", "For your mother in her shroud", "With new love within her eyes". The lines are mostly seven syllables with the stress landing early, so "Orphan Hours, the Year is dead" opens like a tolling bell. "Come and sigh, come and weep!" is shorter, as if the line itself catches on a sob. By the third stanza, to my ear, the rhythm smooths into something more iambic and lulling ("The tree-swung cradle of a child"), which suits the cradle it describes. The even rhymes and steady beat work like the rocking they describe, soothing the reader while the argument is made.
The last stanza turns the calendar into a funeral procession. "January gray" stands "like a sexton by her grave", February "bears the bier", March "with grief doth howl and rave", and April simply "weeps". The grief eases from digging to carrying, then to raving, then to quiet tears. Then comes the poem's sharpest turn: "but, O ye Hours!" The final line, "Follow with May's fairest flowers", works two ways. Flowers are what mourners lay on a coffin, and they are also what spring produces. The funeral and the resurrection become the same event. Notice, too, that the poem ends on a command to the Hours, not on the Year waking. Her return has already been promised ("she will arise"), so the closing instruction invites the children to join in.
This Year also does not die on the neat boundary of a calendar. She "dies" in the cold months and wakes in May, so the poem follows nature's year instead of the clock's. That is part of its significance. Shelley was an English Romantic poet, and the poem shows the Romantic habit of reading nature as a story of loss and renewal. It offers in miniature the hope that closes his "Ode to the West Wind": "If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?" Here that hope comes as a small, tender lullaby, in which the reader is invited to stand among the Hours and learn to grieve a little less.