Few poems announce their own method as cheerfully as «Season to Taste». The title is a cook's phrase, the instruction at the bottom of a recipe, and it hints that the year is something to be sampled, seasoned and tasted rather than measured on a calendar. Kay Sage then does exactly that, moving through spring, summer, autumn and winter in a handful of short lines, each season introduced by a single odd word set apart by a semicolon: "springboard", "summary", "windfall", "winter rose".
Those four headings are the poem's cleverest trick. Each one begins with the sound of its season, so that spring, summer, "wind" and winter are all tucked inside ordinary words that mean something else. A springboard launches; a summary condenses; a windfall is fruit blown down from the tree; a winter rose is a flower blooming out of its time. The poem seems to be saying that the seasons are already hidden in our everyday language, waiting to be noticed. Each word also does a little work of its own: the springboard really does spring the poem into motion, the summary really does sum things up, and the windfall arrives as a gift of falling.
The first stanza is the most playful. "Where the cowslips / there slip I" turns a sentence inside out, as though the grammar itself had slipped on wet grass. The sound is doing the work: "cowslips" is split in two, and "slip" jumps out of it and becomes the speaker's own action. A rough logic follows, a spring day in which one is carried off by a flower's name.
After that the poem settles into quatrains with a clear pattern, and the pattern is a game of swapped places. "Summer in the houses / fever in the hay / showers in the thunder / dreams in the day": every line puts one thing inside another thing that doesn't quite belong to it, or that belongs in a slightly unexpected way. Fever in hay suggests both hay fever and the heat of a summer field; dreams in the day is daydreaming, the lazy mind of July. The rhyme is light and loose, with "hay" and "day" chiming across the stanza, and the rhythm is a quick, tripping beat of three or four stresses that feels more like a skipping rhyme or a proverb than a solemn lyric.
The autumn stanza turns the same machinery darker. "Frost in the killing" echoes the killing frost that ends the growing season, and the words are reversed so that frost now lives inside the act of killing. "Weather in the vane" gives us the weathervane, a thing that only exists to point at change. "Bulls in the rushes" and "hurry in the cane" carry a sense of animals and plants stirring, hurried and disturbed, as the year turns over. The tone grows slightly more urgent, though it never stops being a game.
Then comes the ending, which is the poem's quiet surprise. After the busy two stanzas, winter arrives in just two lines: "fire in the place again / three wise snow men." The fire in the hearth is back, and on the lawn stand three snowmen who, by a small pun, are also the three wise men of the Christmas story. The pattern of "X in the Y" dissolves; the poem finishes not with a rule but with a joke and an image, as if winter were a holiday card.
What makes the poem significant is how much it does with so little. It treats the year as a cycle and a pun at the same time, showing that sound and sense can lead us to the same place. There is no sermon about time passing, yet the movement from "dreams in the day" to "three wise snow men" quietly tells us that the year has run its course. Reading it, you start to hear the seasons hiding in ordinary words, and that small shift in listening is the poem's lasting gift.