December is the month when a year feels like a person. We say it has flown, dragged, been kind or cruel, and in Elizabeth von Schonberg's "December" that habit of speech becomes the whole poem. The year is a weary figure, worn down by its own length and now being put to bed under the snow. The final stanza turns it into a companion, a shared "burden'd year" whose fears the speaker and her readers have lived through alongside it.
The poem moves in four short stanzas, each with its own job. The first is a portrait of exhaustion: "weight of days," hours "lost in ways / That grieve its spirit." The second tucks the year into winter, with snow doing the work of a blanket. The third looks forward to the "young year," and the fourth returns to the old one with a farewell. The structure mirrors the calendar's own handover. We mourn, we rest, we hope, we say goodbye.
The sound of the poem supports this. Each stanza is built on a single repeated rhyme, with three lines that match and a fourth that shortens and breaks away. In the first stanza "days," "ways" and "allays" chime together before the line "The secret dread" closes things down. The effect is a little like a sigh, or like footsteps slowing at the end of a long walk. The rhymes are plain and chiming rather than clever, and that suits a poem about tiredness. The metre is light and falls into short lines of about seven syllables, which gives it the feel of a lullaby. The shorter last line of each stanza acts as the place where the lullaby settles.
The imagery is sparse but pointed. The only physical details are "chill winds" and "snow," yet they carry a lot. The snow is "called to hush the days that go," a phrase that quietly makes silence into a kind of mercy. Snow muffles sound, covers rough ground and smooths everything over, so it becomes the year's anaesthetic rather than its enemy. The phrase "well earn'd rest" repeats the idea. Rest is not weakness here but wages, something owed.
The most interesting moment comes in the third stanza, when the voice suddenly turns outward and speaks directly to the old year: "At the young year's feet you cast / Wisdom gained." The year is imagined as handing down what it has learned, like an elder leaving a legacy at a child's feet. Then comes the question that gives the poem its quiet tension: "is danger past?" It is a real question, and the dread named in the first stanza has not gone away. The following line, "Surely we may hope at last," leans on the word "surely," which sounds confident but reads more like someone reassuring themselves. The hope is genuine, though it is also tentative.
That mix of comfort and unease carries into the ending. "We have shared your every fear" is a striking admission, since it suggests the year was not merely something that happened to the speaker but something endured together. Then the closing line, "The die is cast!", lands with a jolt. The phrase means that a decision has been made and cannot be undone. Placed at the very end, with an exclamation mark, it can be read two ways. It might be relief, because the year's work is finished and fixed. It might also be a small shiver, because the next year's fate is about to be decided by forces nobody controls. The poem does not choose between these readings, and that ambiguity is probably its best feature.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. It uses no grand claims or elaborate metaphors, just a handful of simple words and a steady, hushed rhythm. It catches a feeling most people recognise but rarely put into words: the odd mixture of exhaustion, gratitude and nervous optimism at the end of a year. By treating the year as a tired friend rather than a measurement of time, it makes the turn of the calendar feel personal, even tender.