I have known this poem by heart for many years. Having grown up on a farm in the South of England, the most telling image, for me, of the year's decline is that of the bine-stems. For Americans who aren't familiar with them, these are woodbines, also known as Old Man's Beard. These woody plants sort of curl around the outsides of thickets of other plants (like hazel or alder). In the fall, they grow lots of curly white fluff. By the winter solstice, they are bare again -- like a really old, old man who can't even grow whiskers any more. The woodbine stems represent the formerly lively vegetation that used to sing but now cannot.

Incidentally, woodbine stems are hollow. Sixty years ago, when I was little, I've seen country boys "smoking" them. They would cut off short sections of woodbine stem, light one end, and puff on the other. Perhaps this is why the very cheapest, smallest cigarettes in England used to be Wills' Woodbines. My tutor at Oxford, a chain-smoker, used to buy them in boxes of 100; but for poorer people, they were available in packets of five, ten and twenty.