9 Seasons

As dawn expands into morning, morning brightens into garish noon, noon relaxes into evening and evening thickens into night, so do the seasons change. In Europe there are four wellmarked seasons in the year. Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter. These seasonal changes are, as it were, the work of God, designed

to relieve the monotony of earthly existence. An English poet, R. L. Stevenson, has aptly expressed his idea in the following lines: To make this earth, our hermitage, A cheerful and a changeful page, Gods bright, and intricate device Of days and seasons doth suffice. Poets of England and of the Continent have described the beauties of spring, the gaunt, wasted look of autumn and the cold, nipping air of winter mornings. Thomson has written a poem, Season, in which he describes the seasons of the English Calendar. He tells of the showers in spring and the gay birds that to the deep woods haste away; in summer, the shepherds come back home in the evening at the end of the days toil and are entertained by their simple wives and children; in autumn, nature puts off her leafage and the thrushes, linnets and larks are robbed of their tuneful souls and cease to warble; and lastly in winter, the ploughman, gazing in the distance, finds the fields all covered with snow and the free birds of the air, tamed hy the cruel season, crowd in the barn around the winnowing store. These are some or the finest pencil SKetches in verse of the four seasons in England, in his Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, speaks of the April showers and the west wind inspiring every holt and heath in the countryside. Keats, a romantic poet of the early nineteenth century, describes autumn in his Ode to Autumn as close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; by this pictorial phrase, he of course means, that autumn, aided by the heat -. of the sun, ripens the fruit, gourds and hazelnuts to the core. Autumn is the season when Nature puts on a sad, outworn appearance. The trees shed their leaves and the gardens and crofts ar all full of thousands of withered leaves scattered all around. Milton in Paradise Lost compares the countless rebel angels to the countless withered leaves scattered in the valley of Vallombrosa in Italy. In autumn, the dwellers of the earth reap what they have sown; the farmers winnow their gains and the city people alike of the city and the countryside relax themselves. Man feels lassitude and Nature languor.

Winter is the season for hard work. Like Summer, Winter differently appears in the different parts of the Earth; and the response of human nature to Nature in winter widely varies. In Switzerland and the northern Zones of Europe, winter freezes the waters of the lakes and, in a Russian household, for instance drinking water becomes a luxury and is- replaced by beer. In Pakistan, winter is welcomed everywhere except perhaps in some of hillsides where snow might fall a bit too heavily. In winter, while the schools on the hills close down for the winter vacation, those on the plains work with great enthusiasm. For the poor, it is the hardest of seasons; it is specially so in the Punjab where summer and winter vie with each other in severity. Spring, we suppose, is all peoples luxury. It is enjoyed alike by the rich and the poor. The trees wear new leafage, gardens are full of flowers and in the orchard trees hang with ripe fruits. The rains are the hope and aspiration of the Pakistani peasant. Every peasant looks to the sky eagerly for a patch of cloud and expects it to gather in size and empty itself into a refreshing shower. The rains are welcome everywhere in Pakistan, even in the Punjab in spite of its extensive canals, most so in Sindh and the NWFP where rainfall is extremely low. During the rains, the rich and the poor are easily divided. While the- rich with their raincoats and in galoshed boots move about freely or play indoor games like ping-pong or billiards, the poor peasants in Pakistan have to work in the field, ill-clad and ill-protected, to convert millions of rain-drops into as many millions of grains of wheat in the Punjab. In our imaginative mood, we may well apply the four-part music of the seasons of the year - spring, summer, autumn and winter - to human life. Boyhood full of fancy and dreams is the spring of our life; youth is the summer; middle age when man begins to shed some of his youthful vitality and energy is the autumn and old age is the winter of his earthly career. But if we are realists and do not lei the fancy roam, we would plunge in a spirit of abandon into Natures infinite variety of moods and shapes, sounds and hues and identify ourselves with them; we would recapture some of our lost boyhood and watch with joy the myriads of rivulets hurrying through the lawn after a smart, bracing shower.