Publishing my Edward Thomas

Farewell to the Old Year  from Eleanor and greetings for the New.

Happy New Year!

Eleanor Farjeon

 

 

 

 

The  Thomas Poem

This is one of those Thomas poems that it is easy to overlook or under-value, I think. It's quite brave, the disconcerting vision of the tripod and the pig-barrow.
 I like these 'encounter' poems of his, with a snatch of conversation that stays in the mind long afterwards. They are 'Wordsworthian'  poems  but more pithy and succinct.
Why does the old man want the year over - the war? Lost a son? Or is he thinking of his own life, ready for a new year to bring it to a close perhaps?

Of course the old man and the lively young boys concern the old and new year, like Eleanor's but rather more subtly. I wonder whether we use this imagery as much as we once did.
 I wish you a very happy New Year.

The New Year

He was the one man I met up in the woods
That stormy New Year's morning; and at first sight,
Fifty yards off, I could not tell how much
Of the strange tripod was a man. His body,
Bowed horizontal, was supported equally
By legs at one end, by a rake at the other:
Thus he rested, far less like a man than
His wheel-barrow in profile was like a pig.
But when I saw it was an old man bent,
At the same moment came into my mind
The games at which boys bend thus, High-Cockalorum,
Or Fly-the-garter, and Leap-frog. At the sound
Of footsteps he began to straighten himself;
His head rolled under his cape like a tortoise's;
He took an unlit pipe out of his mouth
Politely ere I wished him "A Happy New Year,"
And with his head cast upward sideways muttered--
So far as I could hear through the trees' roar--
"Happy New Year, and may it come fastish, too,"
While I strode by and he turned to raking leaves.