Poet's Choice

The games at which boys bend thus, High-cockolorum,

Or Fly-the-garter, and Leap-frog. At the sound

Of footsteps he began to straighten himself;

His head rolled under his cape like a tortoise's;

He took an unlit pipe out of his mouth

Politely ere I wished him "A Happy New Year,"

And with his head cast upward sideways muttered --

So far as I could hear through the trees' roar --

"Happy New Year, and may it come fastish, too,"

While I strode by and he turned to raking leaves.

The quiet amusement of this poem may take on an additional quality of sorrow from the fact that Edward Thomas did not see many years. He died in World War I. He was a close friend of Robert Frost, who addresses him as "brother" in the poem "To E.T."

The country encounter, the mild drollery of "far less like a man than/His wheel-barrow in profile was like a pig," the lucid presentation of weather and natural setting, all recall Frost. So, too, does the resumption of a chore at the end of the poem. The return to the business of raking makes a satisfying return to work after a foray first into imagination with the bizarre image of "a tripod of a man," and then into the ordinary, conventional comforts of social life in the repeated phrase "Happy New Year."

(Edward Thomas's poem "The New Year" can be found in "The Poems of Edward Thomas." Handsel Books. Copyright 2003 Handsel Books/Myfanwy Thomas.)

Robert Pinsky was poet laureate of the United States from 1997 through 2000.