Lament in December

by Robert Graves (uncollected poems)

December’s come and all is dead;
Weep, woods, for summer far has sped
And leaves rot in the valley bed.

Grey-blue and gaunt the oak-boughs spread
Mourn through a mist their leafage shed.
December, season of the dead!

Brown-golden, scarlet, orange-red
Autumn’s bright hues are faded, fled.
December, season of the dead!

Graves wrote several poems after the combat along the Somme expressing the feeling of paralysis of numbness which made he himself feel part of the dead; as if all colour had drained out of the landscape with the summer, and everything in the world was dead.