Most poems about the seasons line them up neatly: spring, summer, autumn, winter, each with its own flowers or frost. E. H. Johnson's "Cycle" does something more interesting. It turns the year into a household, with Mother Earth at its center, and lets the seasons play the roles of artist, nurse, baby and teenager. The result is a poem about time that feels oddly domestic, and oddly moving.
The central idea is that nature's renewal works like a family's, with the same tenderness and the same heartbreak. Everything in the poem is born, grows, and hurries off, yet nothing is truly lost, because Mother Earth keeps going. The final line makes this explicit: "Mother Earth sighs, and starts knitting once more." That sigh is the emotional hinge of the poem. She is not triumphant about the year's turning; she is a parent who has watched a child grow up too fast and who, with a mixture of weariness and love, begins again.
The poem's most striking decision is to start with autumn rather than spring. Autumn gets the most playful treatment: he is "an artist with a careless brush," "spilling many colors in his eager rush." The repeated "rush" sounds hurried even before we are told he is "rushing off to get out of the cold." It is a funny, slightly irreverent picture, an artist who splashes red and gold across the canvas and then runs away from the cold before cleaning up. By beginning here, Johnson also quietly signals that the cycle has no true beginning or end. Winter's care leads to spring, spring's growth leads to summer, and summer's end leads back to the painter's careless brush.
Winter is the poem's gentlest figure. As "Nurse Winter," she "tucks blankets around Mother Earth" and "hushes the household of children's mirth." Here is a clever reframing: winter is usually presented as harsh or deadly, but the poem recasts the frozen landscape as a sickroom, quiet and protective. Snow becomes a blanket, silence becomes bedside care. The bold image at the end of the stanza, where Earth is nursed "till a new Spring at her full breast she feeds," joins illness and birth in a single phrase. Rest and new life are not opposites here; one prepares the other.
Spring and summer share the third and fourth stanzas, and the poem's attitude toward them is tinged with melancholy. Spring is "the new-born, all rosy and sweet, / Crawling about at Mother Earth's feet," and the lines trace his small milestones: "to walk and to laugh and to play." Then comes the sudden turn: "All too soon now, he will hurry away." The word "hurry" echoes autumn's "rush," so both the first and the youngest seasons are in motion, as if time itself were impatient. Summer arrives as the "teen-ager," "part child, part man," "awkward and naive, but brave to the core." The parenthetical exclamation "how brief his life span!" is the poem's most openly emotional moment, a small gasp of surprise that something so full of energy lasts so short a time.
Formally, the poem is built as carefully as a nursery rhyme, and that is part of its charm. Each of the four stanzas is a quatrain with rhymed couplets (AABB): "brush" and "rush," "gold" and "cold," "Earth" and "mirth." The lines are long and bouncy, loosely galloping, which suits the sing-song tone of a child's story. But the simplicity is deceptive. The steady rhymes mirror the steady turning of the year, and each stanza closes on a small click of finality, like a page turning.
What makes the poem worth reading is this contrast between light form and weighty subject. Johnson takes an idea familiar to every student, that the seasons repeat, and finds a human shape for it. By making the seasons characters, the poem asks us to feel the cycle rather than merely observe it. Anyone who has watched a younger sibling grow up, or a childhood summer end, will recognize that quiet sigh, and that decision to start knitting again.