page: 51
At the Year’s End
- FLUSHED with a crimson sunrise beauty,
- The fair new year its promise gave;
- Such dreams we had of love, of duty,
- Of heights to scale, of foes to brave!
- Oh, how hope’s fire our future lighted—
- How much to do, how much to know,
- Yet on its brink we shrank affrighted
- A year ago.
- And now the year is done—its pleasure
- So brief, so bright—its hours of pain;
- Some moments’ memories we treasure,
- Some recollections loathe in vain.
- Oh, for a brain where could not waken
- Remembrances of purpose crossed,
- Of trusts abandoned, aims forsaken,
- And chances lost!
- The changing seasons thrust upon us
- Another year, fair‐faced and new;
- What evil have the old years done us
- That this in its turn will not do?
- This, too, will die, and leave us grieving
- For all the ills its arms enfold—
- For faiths betrayed, for friends deceiving,
- And love grown cold.
- We have been fooled. The hopes that fooled us—
- We know them now—have been a lie;
- The star that led, the light that ruled us—
- We scorn them, and we pass them by.
- page: 52
- Shut out hope’s light; past is the season
- When rose‐red glow seemed good to see.
- Look—by the cold white light of reason,
- These things shall be:
- A long, dim vista, blank and dreary—
- The same hard failure, small success;
- The same tired heart, the brain still weary
- Of its intense self‐consciousness;
- The old despair, the old repining,
- And through the future’s deepest night,
- Down life’s untrodden ways still shining,
- The old hope’s light!
