Once more the year begins. The first month of the Gregorian calendar. Cold winds howl, the landscape shivers, frost, snow, ice are the many blankets for the land. Daylight is thin; it arrives late and leaves early, ceding the hours to shadow and the ink of night.

From the pens of our remarkable poets, including Shelley, Dickenson, Shakespeare, Whitman, Gilbran and a wealth of others, come sumptuous verse that describe our moods, feelings, travels and desires of the dawning year.

1 - Fifty Shades of December - An Introduction

2 - Ode Written on The First of December by Robert Southey

3 - A Calender Of Sonnets - December by Helen Hunt Jackson

4 - The Idlers Calendar. Twelve Sonnets For the Year - December by Wilfred Scawen Blunt

5 - Winter by Robert Louis Stevenson

6 - Before Winter by Edith Nesbit

7 - December Matins by Alfred Austin

8 - The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe

9 - Some Too Fragile For Winter Winds by Emily Dickinson

10 - Come Come Thou Bleak December Wind (Fragment 3) by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

11 - On the Death of Major Whitefoord, December 15th 1825 by Eliza Acton

12 - A Wife in London (December 1899) by Thomas Hardy

13 - To the Memory of Mrs Lefroy Who Died December 16th, My Birthday by Jane Austen

14 - Sonnet 6 - Then Let Not Winter's Ragged Hand Deface by William Shakespeare

15 - In Drear Nighted December by John Keats

16 - It is Winter by Daniel Sheehan

17 - Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills by Percy Bysshe Shelley

18 - Gloomily the Clouds Are Sailing by Anne Bronte

19 - December by John Bannister Tabb

20 - Eden In Winter by Vachal Lindsay

21 - To A Lady Who Presented to the Author A Lock of Hair Braided with Her Own and Appointed a Night in December To Meet Him in the Garden by Lord Byron

22 - The December Rose by Edith Nesbit

23 - My Winter Rose by Alfred Austin

24 - To Flowers from Italy by Thomas Hardy

25 - Sicily. December 1908 by Henry Van Dyke

26 - Lachin y Gair by Lord Byron

27 - A December Day by Robert Fuller Murray

28 - Snow-Bound (The Sun That Brief December Day) by John Greenleaf Whittier

29 - December's Snow by Arthur Conan Doyle

30 - Sweetheart Winter by Vachel Lindsay

31 - Winter by Robert Southey

32 - The Foolish Fir Tree by Henry Van Dyke

33 - In the Bleak Midwinter by Christina Georgina Rossetti

34 - December the 23rd 1879 by George MacDonald

35 - A Christmas Carol by Samual Taylor Coleridge

36 - Old Christmastide (An Extract) by Sir Walter Scott

37 - A Visit From St Nicholas ('Twas The Night Before Christmas) by Clement Moore

38 - The Nativity of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by Christopher Smart

39 - Christmas Fancies by Ella Wheeler Wilcox

40 - On the Morning of Christs Nativity by John Milton

41 - Minstrels. A Christmas Poem by William Wordsworth

42 - A Carol. I by Mildmay Fane, Earl of Westmorland

43 - God Rest by Daniel Sheehan

44 - Christmas at Sea by Robert Louis Stevenson

45 - A Nativity by Rudyard Kipling

46 - The Farm Woman's Winter by Thomas Hardy

47 - December the 27th 1879 by George MacDonald

48 - A New Years Eve in Wartime by Thomas Hardy

49 - At the Entering of the New Year by Thomas Hardy

50 - Ring Out Wild Bells. Christmas Poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson

51 - Auld Lang Syne by Robert Burns