Seasonal affective disorder (SAD) is a type of depression that’s related to changes in seasons — SAD begins and ends at about the same times every year. If you’re like most people with SAD, your symptoms start in the fall and continue into the winter months, sapping your energy and making you feel moody.

roundel: an eleven-line poem consisting of three stanzas – a quatrain, tercet, quatrain. The opening line becomes a refrain of the fourth and 11th lines. It is an English variation of the roundeau introduced by Algernon Charles Swinburne.*

Rhyme scheme: abaa bab abaa

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The S.A.D. Roundel Rag

Snide winter suns don’t heat
on their blustery ride;
flashily indiscrete,
snide winter suns don’t heat.

Winter suns glide,
bold but effete,
expansive as they slide

over the edge into the deep.
No matter how you search for the bright side,
that lackluster light spells defeat –
snide winter suns don’t heat.

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*When in his thirty-eighth year, William Butler Yeats’s sister informed him that Swinburne had died, Yeats declared, “Now I am king of the cats.”