My non-resolution New Year's Resolution

So, I have decided this year, as with all the year's in the past, to not make a New Year's Resolution. However, that being said, I am resolved to write more with this blog. I am thinking... once or twice a week. I will start small since there are many changes coming up in my life like potentially moving to another state. I *should* be able to handle once a week though. I will also be resolved to write more interesting things than I have in the past. I realize I tend to go on a few (dozen) tangents... this will probably not change. I will try to make them more interesting tangents, though. How about that?

That being said, I don't really have any poetry to post today. I am completely unprepared. Not that this is so terribly different than usually, except usually I have an idea of what I want to post about. Okay, so here goes nothing. I searched for new year's poetry and followed link trails until I came upon this "The Darkling Thrush" by Thomas Hardy. It seems slightly more somber than we usually think of the new year dawning, but I find I rather like it.

Thomas Hardy regarded himself as a poet who wrote novels for more mercenary means. However, during his lifetime, he was known most for his novels. As his family did not have the means to send him on to college, Hardy became apprenticed to an architect at the age of 16. It was not until he had published Far from the Madding Crowd  that he realized he could make a living as an author and quit the architectural career. After the publication of his novel Jude the Obscure, he gave up writing novels to focus on poetry. Jude the Obscure created a veritable outrage due to traveling outside the realm of "proper" in Victorian England. He was not quite as instantaneous of  a success as a poet as he was as a novelist. However, he is now considered to be one of the greatest poets of the 20th century. He wrote "The Darkling Thrush" on Dec. 30th, 1900.

The Darkling Thrush
Thomas Hardy

I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter’s dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.

The land’s sharp features seemed to be
The Century’s corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware