Read "At the Entering of the New Year" by Thomas Hardy online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
I. (OLD STYLE)
OUR songs went up and out the chimney, / And roused the home-gone husbandmen; / Our allemands, our heys, poussettings, / Our hands-across and back again, / Sent rhythmic throbbings through the casements / On to the white highway, / Where nighted farers paused and muttered, / "Keep it up well, do they!"
The contrabasso's measured booming / Sped at each bar to the parish bounds, / To shepherds at their midnight lambings, / To stealthy poachers on their rounds; / And everybody caught full duly / The notes of our delight, / As Time unrobed the Youth of Promise / Hailed by our sanguine sight.
II. (NEW STYLE)
WE stand in the dusk of a pine-tree limb, / As if to give ear to the muffled peal, / Brought or withheld at the breeze's whim; / But our truest heed is to words that steal / From the mantled ghost that looms in the gray, / And seems, so far as our sense can see, / To feature bereaved Humanity, / As it sighs to the imminent year its say: -
"O stay without, O stay without, / Calm comely Youth, untasked, untired; / Though stars irradiate thee about / Thy entrance here is undesired. / Open the gate not, mystic one; / Must we avow what we would close confine? / _With thee_, _good friend_, _we would have converse none_, / Albeit the fault may not be thine. "