"At the Entering of the New Year"

Unlike Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” (see Dec. 20 posts), Thomas Hardy’s New Year’s poem (see previous post) is one that few of us have ever read.

At one level it is a poem about how our attitudes toward the New Year change from youth to age. In youth we welcome the passing of time and gleefully join in celebration as we look forward to the “youth of Promise” that the New Year represents. In age we resist and shun the passing of time, having experienced the losses of “bereaved Humanity.”

Hardy includes the note, however, “December 31. During the War,” suggesting that he was not thinking only in universal terms but also in terms of World War I, which, at its beginning, may have been embraced with heroic hopes of military glory, but, after ravaging a generation of European youth, must have been lamented and greeted with a shudder.

A closer look reveals more ambiguity than might be apparent at first read. Part I contrasts the indoor revelry of a New Year’s celebration with loneliness (“home-gone husbandmen”), cold (“the white highway”), and darkness (“nighted farers,” “midnight lambings”) of outdoor working men, travelers and even “stealthy poachers.” Youth celebrates with music and dancing, oblivious to the impending doom that change and time will bring.

Part II, in turn, takes place outside at “dusk…in the gray,” where tolling bells are “muffled” and a “mantled ghost” seeks to hold off the New Year: “Thy entrance here is undesired.” Yet that New Year is “comely,” if “untasked, untried,” and “stars irradiate” around it. Age resists the passing of time, yet recognizes the appeal of the New Year and concedes the innocence of change and time: “Albeit the fault may not be thine.” Age mourns the ravages and losses that time brings, but cannot completely resist the charm of a fresh start or a new day.

Similarly, just as the popular enthusiasm for war’s first blush overlooks the inevitable suffering and death, so does war weariness and war resistance still admire the courage and valor and heroic feats of the battlefield. Even the pacifist and war protester give homage to those who have given life and limb and sometimes sanity in service to their country.

Thomas Hardy’s “At the Entering of the New Year” is no simple protest against time or change or war, but a reflection on the ambiguity of human experience, whether in youth or age, at war or at peace.