forgot about this. like the music. jerry looks great.
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"Year’s End" by Richard Wilbur
01
Jan 2010
I came upon this today, quite fortuitously, I suppose. Enjoy. Happy New Year to all. 2010 sounds much better than 2009, in my opinion.
“Year’s End” by Richard Wilbur
Now winter downs the dying of the year,
And night is all a settlement of snow;
From the soft street the rooms of houses show
A gathered light, a shapen atmosphere,
Like frozen-over lakes whose ice is thin
And still allows some stirring down within.
I’ve known the wind by water banks to shake
The late leaves down, which frozen where they fell
And held in ice as dancers in a spell
Fluttered all winter long into a lake;
Graved on the dark in gestures of descent,
They seemed their own most perfect monument.
There was perfection in the death of ferns
Which laid their fragile cheeks against the stone
A million years. Great mammoths overthrown
Composedly have made their long sojourns,
Like palaces of patience, in the gray
And changeless lands of ice. And at Pompeii
The little dog lay curled and did not rise
But slept the deeper as the ashes rose
And found the people incomplete, and froze
The random hands, the loose unready eyes
Of men expecting yet another sun
To do the shapely thing they had not done.
These sudden ends of time must give us pause.
We fray into the future, rarely wrought
Save in the tapestries of afterthought.
More time, more time. Barrages of applause
Come muffled from a buried radio.
The New-year bells are wrangling with the snow.
Category: It Is What It Is
One Comment
Here’s an article that decries the modern celebration of New Years; Ivan has a peculiar style in his writing: he has excellent diction. If you try to read it as a smug group of observations rather than coming from the gingivitis’d mouth of a vindictive street corner preacher, then you might enjoy it better (thus having distanced yourself properly from the accusations it tenders).
Here’s the link to the article itself.
Here’s a juicy except that might pique your interest.
Simon Winchester complains the typical New Year’s celebration has reduced to little more than an excuse for unrestrained drunkenness and revelry. He lays blame for this woeful development partly on the example of the Scottish who have long treated the occasion as an opportunity for drinking themselves into a state of “catatonic incapacity”. Also, some culpability lies with the creation and popularization of modern public clocks that have allowed us to meticulously track and therefore exaggerate and fetishize the grand drama of the exact moment. The combination of chronological exactitude and Scottish bacchanalia gives us the now generally expected annual ritual of “midnight debauchery”.
post script: To Dave Chuck: Thank God the Ball dropped on New Years.
