[A. E. Stallings]

A nice, if dark, one by Robert Graves:


Ancestors

My New Year's drink is mulled to-night
And hot sweet vapours roofward twine.
The shades cry Gloria! with delight
As down they troop to taste old wine.

They crowd about the crackling fire,
Impatient as the rites begin;
Mulled porto is their souls' desire--
Porto well aged with nutmeg in.

'Ha,' cries the first, 'my Alma wine
Of one-and-seventy years ago!'
The second cheers 'God bless the vine!'
The third and fourth like cockerels crow:

They crow and clap their arms for wings,
They have small pride or breeding left--
Two grey-beards, a tall youth who sings,
A soldier with his cheek-bone cleft.

O Gloria! for each ghostly shape,
That whiffled like a candle smoke,
Now fixed and ruddy with the grape
And mirrored at the polished oak.

I watch their brightening boastful eyes,
I hear the toast their glasses clink:
'May this young man in drink grown wise
Die, as we also died, in drink!'

Their reedy voices I abhor,
I am alive at least, and young.
I dash their swill upon the floor:
Let them lap grovelling, tongue to tongue.

[Gregory Dowling]

The most obvious one, by Tennyson. Still a fine resounding poem:

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow;
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind,
For those that here we see no more;
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife,
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweet manners, purer laws.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.

[Gregory Dowling]

And to remain with the obvious but great, here's Hardy:


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 arose 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.


(Anybody wanting a fine analysis of this poem by the starter of this thread should follow this link .)

[Tim Murphy]

Hardy's poem is dated Dec 31, 1900. Greg Williamson's very ambitious Mockingbird is dated Dec 31, 2000. In it a Mockingbird memorably and perfectly imitates an automobile burglary alarm. It is wry, unlike Hardy's gloomy masterpiece, but it is a sobering poem on the day alcoholics call amateur hour. It's in Errors in the Script, Greg's second collection. Happy New Year.

[This message has been edited by Tim Murphy (edited December 31, 2006).]

[Mark Allinson]

The Old Year

by John Clare

The Old Year's gone away
....... To nothingness and night:
We cannot find him all the day
....... Nor hear him in the night:
He left no footstep, mark or place
....... In either shade or sun:
The last year he'd a neighbour's face,
....... In this he's known by none.

All nothing everywhere:
....... Mists we on mornings see
Have more of substance when they're here
....... And more of form than he.
He was a friend by every fire,
....... In every cot and hall--
A guest to every heart's desire,
....... And now he's nought at all.

Old papers thrown away,
....... Old garments cast aside,
The talk of yesterday,
....... Are things identified;
But time once torn away
....... No voices can recall:
The eve of New Year's Day
....... Left the Old Year lost to all.

[Janet Kenny]

Philip Larkin, 1940

New Year Poem


The short afternoon ends, and the year is over;
Above trees at the end of the garden the sky is unchanged,
An endless sky; and the wet streets, as ever,
Between standing houses are empty and unchallenged.
From roads where men go home I walk apart
--The buses bearing their loads away from works,
Through the dusk the bicycles coming home from bricks--
There evening like a derelict lorry is alone and mute.

These houses are deserted, felt over smashed windows,
No milk on the step, a note pinned to the door
Telling of departure: only shadows
Move when in the day the sun is seen for an hour,
Yet to me this decaying landscape has its uses:
To make me remember, who am always inclined to forget,
That there is always a changing at the root,
And a real world in which time really passes.

For even together, outside this shattered city
And its obvious message, if we had lived in that peace
Where the enormous years pass over lightly
--Yes, even there, if I looked into your face
Expecting a word or a laugh on the old conditions,
It would not be a friend who met my eye,
Only a stranger would smile and turn away,
Not one of the two who first performed these actions.

For sometimes it is shown to me in dreams
The Eden that all wish to recreate
Out of their living, from their favourite times;
The miraculous play where all the dead take part,
Once more articulate; or the distant ones
They will never forget because of an autumn talk
By a railway, an occasional glimpse in a public park,
Any memory for the most part depending on chance.

And seeing this through that I know to be wrong,
Knowing by the flower the root that seemed so harmless
Dangerous; and all must take their warning
From those brief dreams of unsuccessful charms,
Their aloof visions of delight, where Desire
And Fear work hand-in-glove like medicals
To produce the same results. The bells
That we used to await will not be rung this year.

So it is better to sleep and leave the bottle unopened;
Tomorrow in the offices the year oon the stamps will be altered;
Tomorrow new diaries consulted, new calendars stand;
With such small adjustments life will again move forward
Implicating us all; and the voice of the living be heard:
"It is to us that you should turn your straying attention;
Us who need you, and are affected by your fortune;
Us you should love and to whom you should give your word."

[A. E. Stallings]

Thanks so much for all these; it was nice to start the New Year off on the right foot with these poems. Thanks Gregory for including a couple of the Greats. It has been a long while since I looked at that Hardy essay. Sobering to think that what lay ahead when it was written was 9/11 and its continuing aftermath.

I am not very familiar with either the Clare or the Larkin. Actually, the wonderful Clare poem, with its "time torn away" put me in mind of Larkin in "Aubade," "time/ torn off unused"--such a wonderful condensed image of the calendar--not sure what to call it, metonymy or autonomasy or something.

I suppose we ought to include Burns' Auld Lang Syne here too.

Happy New Year!

[Mark Allinson]

Happy New Year to you, too, Alicia.

That is an interesting point about "time torn away" in Clare (and Larkin). I would be inclined to consider it a case of metalepsis (transumptio), referring to something by means of something related to that thing - here time for the calendar.

[Janet Kenny]

Happy New Year Alicia. It's good to see you here.

The Clare is a delight. I didn't know it. Thanks Mark.

Janet

[Gail White]

We have on one of our old records a New Year song to the tune of "Greensleeves", which must have been what people sang before "Auld Lang Syne" was written. (Remember that New Year's was the day for exchanging gifts in Elizabethan times). Part of it goes like this:

The old year now away is fled,
The new year it is enter-ed,
So let us all our sins down-tread
And joyfully all appear.
Let's merry be this day,
And let us now both sport and play,
Hang grief, cast care away,
God send us a happy new year.

And now with New Year gifts each friend
Unto each other they do send.
God grant we may all our lives amend,
And that the truth may appear.
Now like the snake, your skin
Cast off, of evil thoughts and sin,
And so the new year begin,
God send us a happy new year!