SOURCE: Bradford, Alan T. “Mirrors of Mutability: Winter Landscapes in Tudor Poetry.” English Literary Renaissance 4 (winter 1974): 3-39.

In the following excerpt, Bradford argues that Sackville's “Induction” was the most influential Tudor poem to use images of winter landscapes to express the human condition.

Descriptions of winter are common in sixteenth-century English poetry, and they almost always function as metaphorical mirrors of the speaker's state of mind; at the same time, the winter landscape is invariably emblematic of that aspect of the human condition that so preoccupied the Renaissance imagination: mutability. Such descriptions apply the figure chronographia, the “counterfeit time,” which normally involves a correlation between the season of the year (or the time of day) and the theme and mood of the poem; this simple precept was thus set down by Robert Henryson:

Ane doolie sessoun to ane cairfull dyte Suld correspond and be equivalent.(1) 

Whereas a description...