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.
– T.S. Eliot, "Little Gidding"
On this last day of 2011, I send each of you my warm and heartfelt best wishes for good health and happiness throughout 2012.
As we start the New Year with poetry (our first poems of 2012), let’s think about newness and things in our lives that are (or have been) new. One option is to write a poem inspired by the T. S. Eliot quote above or to use this quote as an epigraph. Your poem may be about an ending that became a new beginning for you. Another suggestion is to write a poem about New Year’s resolutions or old year reflections.
By way of inspiration, I share with you Alfred, Lord Tennnyson’s
famous lines from “In Memoriam”:
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.
And this haiku in which Kobayashi Issa approaches the New Year with reverence and humility:
New Year's Day –
everything is in blossom!
I feel about average.
Other New Year’s poems:
May the end of 2011 be the beginning of a new year
filled with abundances of good health, happiness, and poetry!
Happy New Year, my friends! God bless you!
P.S. Love, licks, and good puppy wishes from Chaucey!
