A Lament

By Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

O world! O life! O time!

On whose last steps I climb,

Trembling at that where I had stood before;

When will return the glory of your prime?

No more—Oh, never more!

Out of the day and night

A joy has taken flight;

Fresh spring, and summer, and winter hoar,

Move my faint heart with grief, but with delight

No more—Oh, never more!

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winter hoar, short for hoarfrost.  before 900; Middle English hor,Old English hār; cognate with Old Norse hārr gray with age, Old Frisian hēr gray, Old High German hēr old (German hehr august, sublime); the first known use of hoarfrost came during the medieval period in England during the 13th or 14th century. It is not known who first used the term to describe a layer of frost, but at some point the term entered the lexicon of the English language. Its root is taken from the old English adjective "hoary" which means, gray or white in appearance. This word was often used to describe a person of age who had white hair and a white beard. Knowing this, it now makes sense how one would look at a frost-covered tree in that age and call the frost covering it hoarfrost. 

"I think myself, and have always thought, that 'A Lament' is the greatest thing in English poetry out of Shakespeare; the greatest thing in the entire poetry of the world out of Shakespeare, Dante, and Aeschylus. Nowhere else, save in some passages of these three poets, has the passionate experience of life (which is a different thing from the 'criticism' of it), been put into such perfectly faultless and flawless verse."  George Saintsbury 

Found this translation in Hans Hennecke, Gedichte von Shakespeare bis Ezra Pound. Einführungen, Urtexte und Übertragungen (Wiesbaden: Limes Verlag, 1955),  S.127.