Poet's Choice

By Robert Pinsky
Sunday, January 6, 2008

The turn of a new year, along with giddy celebrations and improving resolutions, brings with it a focus on how time rushes along, compressing childhood and age like the barrels of a telescope. At the turn of the year, we may prance and play like toddlers, or we may hunker down protectively, hoping to evade the bearded figure with his scythe and hourglass. In the cycle of new and old, fresh and familiar, there's something exciting, but also a little grotesque, about the brassy feel of a freshly minted number: the newborn "2008" so strange at first that we fail to write it on our checks. Within a week or so, the new number begins to mellow, as we get on with our business.

The English poet Edward Thomas (1878-1917) describes a New Year's Day encounter that includes many of these elements: giddiness and the grotesque, childhood and old age, convention and idiosyncrasy, the outlandish and the familiar:

The New Year

He was the one man I met up in the woods

That stormy New Year's morning; and at first sight,

Fifty yards off, I could not tell how much

Of the strange tripod was a man. His body,

Bowed horizontal, was supported equally

By legs at one end, by a rake at the other:

Thus he rested, far less like a man than

His wheel-barrow in profile was like a pig.

But when I saw it was an old man bent,

At the same moment came into my mind

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.