DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE - THE NEW YEAR

so this is the new year
and I don’t feel any different

the clanking of crystal
explosions off in the distance
in the distance…

so this is the new year
and I have no resolution

it’s self-assigned penance?
for problems with easy solutions

so everybody put your best suit or dress on
let’s make believe that we are wealthy for just this once
lighting firecrackers off on the front lawn
as thirty dialogues bleed into one
i wish the world was flat like the old days
so i could travel just by folding the map
no more airplanes or speed-trains or freeways
there’d be no distance that could hold us back

so this is the new year
so this is the new year
so this is the new year
so this is the new year

At the Entering of the New Year

        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.”

December 31. During the War.

— Thomas Hardy (1840 - 1928), English Poet