New Year's Poems - Do You Have a Favorite?

[Rybka]

Although written for the turn of a century, this has always been my favorite New Years poem. - I don't wish I had written it; I wish I could steal it!

The Darkling Thrush

I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter's dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.

The land's sharp features seemed to be
The Century's corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice outburst among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.

- Thomas Hardy (12/31/1899)


Happy NEW YEAR !

 

[Guest]

My choice....

Coming

On longer evenings,
Light, chill and yellow,
Bathes the houses.
A thrush sings,
Laurel-surrounded
In the deep bare garden,
It's fresh-peeled voice
Astonishing the brickwork.
It will be spring soon,
It will be spring soon -
And I, whose childhood
Is a forgotten boredom,
Feel like a child
Who comes upon a scene
Of adult reconciling,
And can understand nothing
But the unusual laughter,
And starts to be happy.

Philip Larkin (Feb 1959)


Happy New Year.

 

[Linbido]

Hi! I'm back, still in Norway, but on an unrestricted net access.


Here's one milennium poem for a nice perspective:


Millennia are fairly common things:
In a billion years are quite a few.
Long or short, their roundness pleasure brings:
Life needs some pretext to begin anew.
Each millennium's a fresh, blank page:
No future ever stretched so fair and far.
Now we wait upon the empty stage
In hopes we'll catch a glimpse of who we are.
Underneath is something vast and free:
Millennia are chains across a sea.

(Nicholas Gordon)

 

[Angeline]

This isn't really a New Year's poem

but one about the passage of time, and one I really love.

The Wild Swans at Coole
William Butler Yeats

THE trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine-and-fifty Swans.

The nineteenth autumn has come upon me
Since I first made my count;
I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
Upon their clamorous wings.

I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,
And now my heart is sore.
All's changed since I, hearing at twilight,
The first time on this shore,
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread.

Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.

But now they drift on the still water,
Mysterious, beautiful;
Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake's edge or pool
Delight men's eyes when I awake some day
To find they have flown away?

 

[Guest]

Another

Absence

Billy Collins

This morning as low clouds
skidded over the spires of the city

I found next to a bench
in a park an ivory chess piece

the white knight as it turned out --
and in the pigeon-ruffling wind

I wondered where all the others were
lined up somewhere

on their red and black squares
many of them feeling uneasy

about the salt-shaker
that was taking his place,

and all of them secretly longing
for the moment

when the white horse
would reappear out of nowhere

and advance toward the board
with his distictive motion,

stepping forward, then sideways
before advancing again --

the same move I was making him do
over and over in the sunny field of my palm.