January Lament

January! How quickly the new year turns! The blink of an eye and everything is changed, at least in the subtle moodiness of our subjectivity, if not in cold, objective terms. The gloom descends, with festivities put away for another year, and all the talk of tides and floods, unnatural weather and miserable predictions of six months of ice and snow. Six months of Arctic conditions - surely not! But the mere thought of it is enough to dampen our spirits, darken our thoughts and allow into the corners of our consciousness just a hint of belief. What if they're right?

And for us literary types, steeped in the doom and gloom of the past, how easy it is to fall into step with the poets of yesterday and share all their miserable misgivings about the year that lies ahead. Maybe in our middle years, in the midst of a dark wood, we have lost our way. Maybe a waste land of ice and snow, as well as moral degeneration, lies out there ahead of us with the falling towers, crumbling cities. Maybe...

So happy New Year, one and all! Join me in a moment's mournful meditation before we make ourselves a cheery cup of tea and get on with putting the Christmas decorations back in the box...

 

Eliot's Lament

 

January! At a stroke

December's magic falls away.

Sweet-smelling hay,

Warm swaddling bands

And a choir of glittering angels

Give way to bleak midwinter.

 

Thirty-one days of leanness,

Marked out one by one,

The New Year's calendar

Empty, unused, on the wall

Where Christmas stockings hung,

Bright with hope and longing,

Memory and desire.

 

January! Harbinger of ice and snow.

No longer Christmas.

No more the bright Advent candles

Illumine our way,

Our festive days.

No! Sprung from the Virgin's womb,

A hard and bitter winter

One dark day at a time.

 

A birth and yet a death:

Gold, frankincense and myrrh,

Coming late to the party,

Borne by tall, dark strangers,

Sweep us onward, unknowing,

Toward Easter's passion

And the dark night of the soul.

 

Thrust headlong

Into an uncertain future,

We stumble in the darkness

Pause on the threshold,

Yearning, struggling, onwards

For those first green shoots of spring.

 

Yet, April may yet be the cruellest month.