The music-lesson of Confucius, And Other Poems

OUT from the North, where ice and snow
Hold one eternal carnival,
Whirling with tempests as they blow,
While deadly frost is over all,
Just newly born,
Unstained, unworn
With light for life-blood fast I fly;
Lord of the hours
With sun or showers,
King of the Year—lo! here am I!

And I am of your lives a part,
Your very selves—remember well!
I beat in every bounding heart,
And grow in every flower and shell.
The roaring sea
Is blue with me;
Each oak-ring with its circled rhyme
Repeating what
The last year taught,
All chronicle my round of time.

The mighty mountains know my hand,
The tides all count me hurrying on;
New born, new dead, in every land;
Record me coming—show me gone;

The rocks and graves,
The flowers and waves,
The lonely plains, where all is drear,
With ruins old
And loves untold,
All tell the story of the year.

The silent forms that flit around
Man's daily doings, out and in:
Unborn to sight, unkin to sound,
Free from the shade of sense or sin;
To them each hour
An awful power
More than to mortal man I seem.
They count my bounds,
And know the rounds
Scarce glimmering in a Plato's dream.

The lovely face with golden hair
Which seemed to thee a world divine;
The graceful arms—the all too fair,
I swear by truth shall all be thine!
What doth appear
On earth most dear
Is all a promise made below,
When it hath slept
It will be kept
In the fair rose-life yet to blow.

All this I mark—all this I am,
I die, but I shall live again;
I rise in every choral psalm,
I vanish with the ripened grain,
Then though we die
Sing loud—fill high!

And be your laughter brave and long!
The year's great power
Is in each hour;
All time is but a New Year song!

University of Virginia Library

SONG OF THE NEW YEAR.