4 Poems for an Auspicious New Year

A "Happy New Year" greeting card from 1909. Public Domain

From joy to nostalgia, the New Year marks a celebration of life in all its forms.

The official end of the calendar year often carries a mixture of melancholy and anxious excitement. We rejoice at the closure of a year-long journey but feel nostalgia for experiences we might never repeat. We celebrate life, family, and love, but we also ponder the hardships that may lie ahead. Our resolutions are testaments of discipline, but the thought of turning our lives upside down can become daunting.

Writing from different places at different times, these four authors capture well this mixture of moods, underscoring the symbolic importance of the new year for all of us.

Start the new year with smiles and hope for a great year. LUMIKK555/Shutterstock

T.S. Eliot: New Beginnings

The New Year offers an opportunity to reset completely. Many of us treat the occasion as an opportunity to start life with a blank slate: “Old me” ends here. If this is your driving motivation this year, you may find support in a passage from T. S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding”:

For last year’s words belong to last year’s language And next year’s words await another voice. And to make an end is to make a beginning.

With the new year comes the realization that a season of life has passed, and that another one awaits. The “language” of our old self—our words, attitudes, and deeds—is given the chance to mutate. Whatever that entails for each of us, there’s “another voice” waiting for a new speaker. It’s up to us to make it better.

Thomas Mann: The Passage of Time

The passage of the seasons also reminds us that our lives are relatively trivial in the grand scheme of things. One look at a starry sky should suffice to remember that our “pale blue dot,” as Carl Sagan put it, is but a tiny speckle in an unfathomably large universe. Some people dread this thought, while others find it comforting. Thomas Mann seemed to share the second outlook.

In “The Magic Mountain,” the German author wrote, “Time has no divisions to mark its passage, there is never a thunder-storm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year. Even when a new century begins it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols.”

We may celebrate the coming of a new season with “bells and whistles,” but, for Mann, an honest reckoning of our ever-changing world should temper our celebrations in perspective. That’s not necessarily a reason to abandon all festivities, and to forgo joy for nihilism. Mann’s reminder is encouragement to cherish life even more earnestly, provided we remember that it’s part of a much greater story.

The tradition of waiting until midnight to ring in the New Year is relatively new. It didn't become popular until the mid 20th-century. Public Domain

Alfred Tennyson: Remembering the Old

The desire to restructure our lives with the coming of a new year often stems from a wish to eliminate harmful habits. Say we want to take our health more seriously. We know our condition isn’t as good as it could and should be, so we pledge allegiance with ourselves in the name of positive change.

For some of us, however, the main motivation is to keep close the good things we were able to develop and discover, be they fruitful habits, constructive attitudes, or recurring experiences. In “The Death of the Old Year,” the English poet Alfred Tennyson mourned the year’s end, which he saw as a symbolic separation between the good of the past and the unsettling uncertainty of the future.

Addressing the old year as a friend, Tennyson plead for its survival:

Old year you must not die; You came to us so readily, You lived with us so steadily, Old year you shall not die.

He doesn’t want the old year to die because it “gave [him] a friend and a true love/ And the New-year will take ‘em away.” With closure comes the melancholic realization that we must leave behind what belongs to the past.

Yet the break shouldn’t be so stark. It’s possible to get rid of undesirable things while retaining desirable ones. We try to preserve the good and shed the bad. We sift through habits and experiences to select those we want in our lives and those we don’t. That’s how we ought to appreciate the dear past and the soon-to-be old year.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox: Life in All its Forms

The assortment of emotions every year affords us is captured well by Ella Wheeler Wilcox’s “The Year”:

What can be said in New Year rhymes, That’s not been said a thousand times?

The new years come, the old years go, We know we dream, we dream we know.

We rise up laughing with the light, We lie down weeping with the night.

We hug the world until it stings, We curse it then and sigh for wings.

We live, we love, we woo, we wed, We wreathe our brides, we sheet our dead.

We laugh, we weep, we hope, we fear, And that’s the burden of the year.

In this simple but evocative poem, Wilcox, like Mann, reminds us, that certain patterns seem destined to repeat themselves. The sequence of experiences available to us is somewhat predictable, like the passage of time. Yet for Wilcox, the focus wasn’t the apparent insignificance of human affairs, but the beauty of the human experience in all its variability.

The myriad emotions that live within us—the “laughing” and the “weeping” and the hugging—are a “burden,” but one that makes life rich and memorable. We sheet our dead, but we wreathe our brides. We fear, but we love as well.

A 1915 photograph of Ella Wheeler Wilcox, author and poet. Public Domain

There’s melancholy in Wilcox’s verses. She wonders whether the coming year will really bring anything new, or whether it will be a repetition of what’s “been said a thousand times.” Even so, her melancholic mood carries a celebratory note. That goes for Tennyson’s old year and Eliot’s new season. Wilcox reminds us that this special occasion is first and foremost a celebration of life in all its wondrous forms.

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