For Nature ever faithful is To such as trust her faithfulness. When the forest shall mislead me, When the night and morning lie, When sea and land refuse to feed me, ’Twill be time enough to die. Then will yet my mother yield A pillow in her greenest field Nor the June flowers scorn to cover The clay of their departed lover.

Meaning: The rhyme makes a husband dread a clear, pleasant Candlemas as strongly as his wife’s death. It exaggerates the fear attached to a calendar-weather sign.

Meaning: The saying associates a hot May with a full churchyard. It makes a month’s warmth an ominous sign of deaths without providing a measured relationship.

Meaning: The timing of death cannot be treated as an appointment people can count on controlling. The calendar image expresses uncertainty about life’s duration, encouraging awareness of limits without making a prediction about any individual or demanding constant urgency.

Meaning: Death is imagined as unable to hear objections, so a protest cannot make it negotiate. The saying expresses mortality’s finality rather than a judgment about how someone should feel about loss.