What is the paraphrase of winter by William Shakespeare?

Answer 1

The two songs sometimes called "Winter" and "Spring" which appear at the end of Shakespeare's play Love's Labour's Lost, have a lot of symbolism which has to do with cuckolds, men whose wives have cheated on them. In particular, the songs imitate the calls of the two birds the cuckoo and the horned owl because of the association between horns and cuckolds (a jealous husband was sometimes called a "horned owl"). Both birds can be symbols of either the trapped (the cuckolded husband) or the trapper (their unfaithful wives). The cuckoo's call taunts the married man, labelling him as a cuckold (also, cuckoos lay their eggs in other birds' nests, so a married man cannot be certain which "cuckoo" laid its "egg" in that man's "nest"); the owl cries "tu-whit" or "to it", a sort of sexual exhortation, and the bird's name was used to refer to prostitutes as well as to refer (in the "horned owl" variant) to a cuckolded husband. So both songs are about birds that are associated with cuckoldry, a common fear among men back in that time, and a common thing of which to make sport in comic plays. Especially a comic play that was set up to be a marriage play, but that ends with an indefinite situation in which the pairs are waiting for a year (or in the case of Don Armado, three years).

But to the question of a paraphrase. The two songs (or really two verses of the same song, as they have the same rhythm and thyme scheme) can be paraphrased as follows: "In the spring when the birds and flowers are out we hear a cuckoo which reminds married men of the word 'cuckold'. In the winter when it's freezing cold and everyone is coughing and has a runny nose we hear the owl" Don't ask me who "Greasy Joan" is or why she's keeling a pot, which apparently rhymes with "note".