The Year by Ella Wheeler Wilcox | Poets.org

What can be said in New Year rhymes, That's not been said a thousand times?

The Year

by Ella Wheeler Wilcox

 

What can be said in New Year rhymes,

That’s not been said a thousand times?

 

The new years come, the old years go,

We know we dream, we dream we know.

 

We rise up laughing with the light,

We lie down weeping with the night.

 

We hug the world until it stings,

We curse it then and sigh for wings.

 

We live, we love, we woo, we wed,

We wreathe our brides, we sheet our dead.

 

We laugh, we weep, we hope, we fear,

And that’s the burden of the year.

 

From Poets.org — Ella Wheeler Wilcox was born in 1850 and published her poems widely in newspapers and periodicals. She wrote extensively about her own biography and what she called “The New Thought.”