
The following little poem is such an odd juxtaposition of subject matter and rhyme scheme, I don’t know quite what to make of it. If the poet is trying to express the human experience we all share as we look ahead to the new year–despite the number of times it’s been expressed before–the rhyme scheme seems to fight against it to convey a world-weary cynicism. What do others think?

I’ll just stick with the straightforward and unequivocal:

I’m with you Liz, the vintage card is so lovely. A blessed and brilliant new year to you⭐️
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Thank you, Suzanne, wishing you the same!
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Thank you 😊
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I love these vintage cards.. have a great 2019.
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I love vintage cards as well. Here is a link to the source where I found this one: https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/search/index?utf8=%E2%9C%93&keywords=new+year#. It was hard to choose just one!
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Thanks, Liz..This is the one I mostly use… I have a direct link to it on one of my other blogs… http://olddesignshop.com/
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Thanks for the link! I’ve saved it for future reference. There also looks to be some interesting ephemera on that site.
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Plan to stay a while when you visit, it’s addictive… tell Julie I recommended her site… 🙂
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Namaste Liz, Happy New Year 🙂
A moment found to pause and post pictures and a poem in purposeful celebration of the New Year, wonderful! 🙂 The subject matter of the header image is a metaphorical delight, whilst previous ownership of the print by The Gordon Hotel a curiosity in itself.
Regards the lugubrious poem by Ella Wheeler Wilcox – one wonders in what year it was written – it exudes a sense of fatalistic realism, perhaps suggestive of loss – her weariness is almost palpable, but yet, one feels a sense of hope as she finds a balancing point with her thoughts.
The final image is entirely bucolic – an unambiguous celebratory message of peace and happiness: the idyllic homestead, what better place is there for centring a joyous life.
Thank you for posting. I hope the year ahead will provide health, happiness, good fortune and luck in abundance and bring all your dreams to fruition.
Brightest Blessings in all ways always.
Namaste 🙂
DN
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The book in which the poem appears was published in 1910. Thank you for the good wishes for the new year. I have a page of notes for a new story, so the new year is off to an auspicious start!
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Namaste Liz 🙂
My pleasure. Thank you for providing the date – Poems of Experience, published in 1910 – I hope you enjoy the read.
A page of notes – excellent! Then its best word forward and don’t spare the horses 🙂
Namaste 🙂
DN
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I think it is a bit world-weary . Apparently it comes from her Poems of Experience. I wonder if other poems in that collection have a similar tone. The vintage card is lovely.
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Thanks, Ann. You’ve confirmed my initial impression. I just found Poems of Experience on Project Guttenberg, so I’m going to read it and find out! http://www.gutenberg.org/files/5170/5170-h/5170-h.htm
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Oh that’s great. I had a quick search and couldn’t find them. I will have a look, too.
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Hmm, I wondering if it is in Poems of Experience? Did you find it there?
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I apologize! I got the source wrong. It appeared in Poetical Works of Ella Wheeler Wilcox on page 260. https://archive.org/details/poeticalworksofe00wilc/page/260 While you’re there, check out the poem on the following page, “The Land of Content.” It really speaks to our times.
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It certainly does. In the previous link, I thought The Trip to Mars was very apt for our times.
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You’re right, this stanza in particular:
From the derelict barque of a sun gone dark,
Adrift on our fair ship’s path,
A beacon star shall guide us afar,
And far from the comet’s wrath.
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I like the first image of the old year with his garland of holly. He should be the one holding the glass, though, and toasting the arrival of the new year. I guess in those days they started drinking young. Happy New Year, Liz!
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Chortle!!
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The illustration with the guzzling baby held by grandpa/Santa/? is a bit sinister and very Victorian! The poem is right on the mark. Happy new year Liz!
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Thanks, Shayne! I like your description: “a bit sinister and very Victorian.” I wonder if I could get a character of it . . .
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The passage of time is just that … the passage of time. For the Year to be truly a New Year calls for effort on our part. Just as Ella Wilcox writes, “There is no chance, no destiny, no fate, that can circumvent or hinder or control the firm resolve of a determined soul.”
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Your comment about the passage of time reminds me that turning the year on the calendar has never marked a new year for me.. Instead, what brings renewal and hope is the start of a new season . Every time the season changes, it’s like I’ve been given another second chance.
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Repentance and redemption … quite profound!
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Well, that’s a heavyish poem in one sense. But the silver lining I pick up on is Wilcox’s reminder, even if unintentional, for each of us to live our lives while we can in ways that are meaningful to us and others with whom we’re connected and, thus, bear with grace the year’s burden that we all share.
Thanks for this intriguing and thoughtful post to start 2019, Liz. Endless good blessings to you for the year ahead. Brett 🙂
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Thank you for your good wishes, Brett! I count the photographs and artwork on your blog as one of my blessings.
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🙂
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Beautiful vintage card, Liz! And I quite liked the poem, with its world-weary tone one could have mistaken it for a contemporary poem.
Happy New Year again! 😊
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Thanks, Sarah! I’ve dipped into a few more of Wilcox’s poems and found that same sense of world-weariness.
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I like the world-weary poem, as it minds me of the cycle in Faulkner’s _Light in August_ of life, death, love, and rebirth. Pregnant “Lena” comes to town looking for a man named “Burch” and finds a man named “Bunch.” The story contains tragic endings, but in the end affirms continuation.
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Thank you for your comment! It’s been so long since I read Light in August that I didn’t make the connection.
I’m so happy to meet another Faulkner fan. Here’s a description from my Facebook page of what his writing did for me:
I’ve had a passion for literary fiction ever since I was assigned to read William Faulkner’s “Barn Burning” in the ninth grade. My fourteen-year-old self found that story transcendent in its use of language to convey truths of the human condition I couldn’t even imagine–but at the same time, the story was very much grounded in the real world of cheese and dirt and manure-fouled boots.
Reading “Barn Burning set me on the path of becoming a writer, and I’ve been on that path ever since. I write literary fiction, not because I think I can achieve the transcendence of a “Barn Burning” or an As I Lay Dying, but because I know it is possible.
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I haven’t read “Barn Burning,” but it sounds like F. was able to employ figurative language in the same effective way there as in his novels.
I’m not even familiar with what’s in the current literary canon. By now, Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner are all rather passe. Even Shakespeare is marginalized, which I find regrettable.
I think _Ulysses_ was the best novel I ever studied.
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Here’s a link to “Barn Burning,” in case you’re interested in reading it: http://faculty.weber.edu/jyoung/english%206710/barn%20burning.pdf. I never studied (or read) Ulysses. My professors talked about it, but never assigned it. I might venture to say that currently, the concept of a literary canon itself is passe.
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Interesting point about the canon. I read elsewhere that, in US high schools, students just pick the books they want to read in English, and the instructor has to go along with it. Nor is a foreign language required anymore… Thanks for the link. As for _U_, I think it’s a worthwhile read once in your life. I picked it up a second time and reread “Nestor” some years back. It was beautiful. I mainly like the book for its pro-Semite message (Poldy Bloom is a Jew). But reading it is a commitment of time and effort. If you’re curious about it, you might look into it someday.
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What you’re describing about high schools sounds as if it will lead to a “book report” with a pointless plot summary.
I expect you’re right about needing to read Ulysses at least once in my life, but that deep a commitment is going to have to wait until retirement when I have uninterrupted days to binge-read like when I was a kid.
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It’s not a must-read book. I actually wish Joyce had expressed the same theme of universal love in a 100-pg. book rather than 600. I was 22yo and a student when I covered it. We had a lot of fun with that and _Dubliners_ and _Portrait of the Artist_.
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Thanks for an introduction to a poet I did not know. Ms. Wheeler Wilcox (1850-1919) received her share of notice as a popular poet. Her phrases strike us as rather lame, I suppose, but there’s something genuinely, viscerally daunting in “We wreathe our brides, we sheet our dead.”
Yi!
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Thanks for your comment, Brad! I subscribe to Poem-a-Day from poets.org, which has introduced me to a very wide range of poets. With 19th and early 20th century poetry in particular, I sometimes struggle to accept the poem on its own terms, rhymes and all.
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That’s an interesting poem. Reading when the author lived gives it a little more understanding. Their arts were more down-to-earth than ours tend to be, I think. I suppose today, the closest we come is “gritty realism”, but really I like her poem better than what passes as that. =) There is some positive, and some matter-of-fact. What we might see as a down attitude is probably just acceptance for her. Thanks for sharing that, as it definitely makes one pause and think about differences and commonalities with one’s antecedents.
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I’m glad the poem gave you some food for thought. You’ve piqued my interest with your comment about “gritty realism.”
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Good Reads shelf of that name includes things as diverse as To Kill a Mockingbird and The Godfather, as well as more modern tales like Mockingjay and Gone Girl.
Author Mark Lawrence said this: “So when the term gritty realism is employed it is not, as it is often accused of being, the case that the person is saying that ‘gritty’ is ‘realistic’, it is not that the term is implying that focusing on the ‘gritty’ aspects of life makes the fiction more realistic. Not at all. What it is saying is that this fiction is going to focus on the gritty aspects of a situation (a choice) and to attempt to present those realistically” and “Gritty realism doesn’t imply a work that suggests a dark and gritty view of the world is realistic. It implies a work resulting from the decision to focus on those aspects and present them realistically.”
I think of it as life dressed in no illusions. That’s almost impossible, of course. We all have illusions. And some of us have delusions, as well. =)
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I read Mark Lawrence’s post defining the term, which reminded me of literary minimalism from the 1980s, Raymond Carver’s work in particular.
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Sorry to jump in, but what do you think of Thornton Wilder’s representational theater? Is that considered minimalist?
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I’m having to dig way back in my memory banks for this one, but I would say no. Thornton Wilder’s representational theater is allegorical rather than minimalist.
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You know, I goofed: it was presentational. Whatever, it employed a min of props and a max of audience participation to collectively create reality. Very powerful when done well.
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Yes, it is. There’s something about live theater that conveys and connects you to the human experience in a way that nothing else can.
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That poem is a perfect description of the years as they pass.
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Yes, it is. I think it suggests that we feel the passage of time more acutely with every year that passes. I know I do.
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Lovely and somewhat realistic I would say!
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Thank you, Val!
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