Spring is supposed to be the good news of the year, and "S.A.D" gives it barely two days. "For a day or two / a warm green taste escapes the diesel fumes": the verb "escapes" makes spring sound like a fugitive slipping out of a polluted city, and "taste" blends the senses so that the season is something swallowed, not just seen. The title reads as the acronym for seasonal affective disorder, though that is an inference from the letters. It also puns on the plain word "sad," and the full stops between the letters give a clinical label an awkward, stuttering look. Whatever the poet's own situation, the poem is less interested in diagnosing than in making the reader feel a year wear a mind down.
The form does much of that work. There is no rhyme and no steady metre, just free verse with ragged line lengths and phrases stranded far to the right: "the wind," "yet sudden," "everything," "luminescent." These indents work like held breaths or sighs, small drops in energy on the page. The ampersands give the voice a hurried, text-message casualness, which makes the occasional grand phrase ("the verdant birth of Spring") feel almost borrowed. The poem seems to know this. After the trailing ellipsis, the lyrical mood collapses: "then routine returns to smother it all / in bullshit." The swear word breaks the poetic register on purpose. Birdsong, the classic emblem of spring, "becomes just more white noise we all ignore," and the poem shows how habit dulls us to beauty.
Summer fares no better. It is "languorous / yet sudden," a contradiction that captures how a season can drag and still ambush you. Its light is "sullen," and its attempt to colour "every hour / of each dilating day" is called "doomed." "Dilating" suggests time stretched wide, even an eye forced open against glare, so brightness becomes pressure instead of pleasure. Autumn, by contrast, arrives with the most familiar melancholy: "I hear / violins." It is the only moment where "I" stands alone rather than "us" or "we," as if private feeling briefly overrides the shared voice. Then comes a quiet reversal. The wind that once whispered the news of spring is now "once-whispering" and "devours the trees." The same force, the same word-family, has turned predator.
Winter is the poem's boldest stretch. The opening simile is gentle, with snow falling "like dove feathers," and its "frail purity / breaks beneath our feet," so even the softest image carries a hint of human damage. Then the light turns strange: "bleached out & / luminescent," with clouds as "lingering white phosphorus." Phosphorus is a weapon, and the stanza ends with its sharpest claim: "as if / the winter sky is a war crime above us." The image is shocking, and it fits, since the doves of peace have become something burning. It captures how a pale, beautiful sky can feel like an assault when your mood is low. The comparison is hyperbolic, but exaggeration is what the feeling is like from the inside.
The closing lines pull the seasons together. "Every year becomes this" admits that the cycle is a loop, and the flower's "imperceptible blooming" is already "slowly turning / towards decay." Growth and decline are not separate stages here but one motion. The repeated "slow" ("slowly," "slow to remember") sets up the final neat reversal, "slow to remember & quick to forget," which sounds like a proverb about why we repeat the same suffering annually. "Elision" is a precise word: in speech it means a sound slurred away, and here it is the seasons themselves running together. The last line returns to profanity ("fucks with our head(s)"), echoing "bullshit" and framing the poem in blunt speech. The bracketed "(s)" is a nice touch, hesitating between one mind and many, between private illness and a shared human condition.
The poem matters because it rejects the old habit of treating the seasons as a tidy cycle of renewal and instead writes them from the inside of an urban, weary, modern mind. It lets lyrical beauty and crude honesty collide on the same page, so the reader feels how hard it is to stay open to beauty when the year keeps tilting you.