It is now as in spring and summer-- Keen blows the blast and ceaseless rain descends; The half-stripped hedge a sorry shelter lends, and he thinks it would be nice to have a hovel, no matter how small, to take refuge in, and at once sets about its construction.
In some sequestered nook, embanked around, Sods for its walls and straw in burdens bound; Dried fuel hoarded is his richest store, And circling smoke obscures his little door; Whence creeping forth to duty's call he yields, And strolls the Crusoe of the lonely fields.
On whitehorn tow'ring, and the leafless rose, A frost-nipped feast in bright vermilion glows; Where clust'ring sloes in glossy order rise, He crops the loaded branch, a cumbrous prize; And on the flame the splutt'ring fruit he rests, Placing green sods to seat the coming guests; His guests by promise; playmates young and gay; But ah! fresh pastures lure their steps away! He sweeps his hearth, and homeward looks in vain, Till feeling Disappointment's cruel pain His fairy revels are exchanged for rage, His banquet marred, grown dull his hermitage, The field becomes his prison, till on high Benighted birds to shades and coverts fly.
"The field becomes his prison," and the thought of this trivial restraint, which is yet felt so poignantly, brings to mind an infinitely greater one.

Look, he says-- From the poor bird-boy with his roasted sloes to the miserable state of those who are confined in dungeons, deprived of daylight and the sight of the green earth, whose minds perpetually travel back to happy scenes, Trace and retrace the beaten worn-out way, whose chief bitterness it is to be forgotten and see no familiar friendly face.
"Winter" is, I think, the best of the four parts it gives the idea that the poem was written as it stands, from "Spring" onwards, that by the time he got to the last part the writer had acquired a greater ease and assurance.

At all events it is less patchy and more equal.

It is also more sober in tone, as befits the subject, and opens with an account of the domestic animals on the farm, their increased dependence on man and the compassionate feelings they evoke in us.

He is, we feel, dealing with realities, always from the point of view of a boy of sensitive mina and tender heart--one taken in boyhood from this life before it had wrought any change in him.