January / Jane G. Austin

January

O dark and cold! O dead and drear!
    O bitter end of weary strife!
Art thou indeed the glad New Year,
    Thou stillborn mockery of life?

And art thou then the final fate,
    The end for which our years were born,
So white, so still, so desolate,
    A night that never leads to morn?

It is not peace, this frozen calm,
    And yet it is surcease of pain,
Nepenthe is the surest balm,
    For wounds so healed, bleed not again.

Yes, we will love thee, month of death,
    Yes, we will call thee glad New Year.
Freeze with thy kiss my weary breath,
    See, I am thine, I know no fear.

~~
Jane G. Austin (1831-1894)
from Through the year with the poets: January, 1886

[Poem is in the public domain worldwide]

[February]

Jane G. Austin biography

    Lori Iverson, National Elk Refuge, Wyoming, January 2012. CC BY 2.0 Wikimedia Commons.

January / Ellwood Roberts

January

The short midwinter days are here,
The nights are frosty now and chill —
The solemn midnight of the year —
The snow lies deep on vale and hill.
No longer runs the streamlet nigh,
The ice has bound its waters fast;
An Arctic wind is sweeping by,
The bare trees shiver in the blast.

How changed the Schuylkill's tide! no more
It sparkles in the noonday light;
The ice extends from shore to shore,
Its strength increasing, day and night.
The skaters o'er its surface fly,
In rhythmic motion, all the day,
While dark clouds sweep across the sky,
Foreboding tempests on the way.

And soon we see the storm begin,
All day the snowflakes scurry past,
All night we hear the tempest's din,
The forests bend beneath the blast.
In whirling clouds the snow is hurled,
Along the hillside, down the glen;
Another day the whole bright world
Is shut by drifts beyond our ken.

But soon the sun resumes his sway,
His noontide beams are warm and bright;
The stubborn ice-bridge yields by day,
Though drear and sombre falls the night.
Alternate thaw and storm and cold,
With snowdrifts deep and changeful sky,
The earth in chill embrace enfold —
And so the month goes slowly by.

Midwinter days and nights so drear,
With storm-clouds sweeping o'er the sky—
The solemn midnight of the year
Soon pass and leave no token nigh.
Bare trees that quake beneath the blast,
Will yet be clothed in leafage bright,
And days so chill — the Winter past —
Be bathed in floods of Spring-time light.

~~
Ellwood Roberts (1846-1921)
From Lyrics of Quakerism, and other poems, 1895

[Poem is in the public domain worldwide]

Ellwood Roberts biography

Logopop, Moonlight in the middle of nowhere 4, 2011. CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons

A January Night / Thomas Hardy

A January Night
         (1879)

The rain smites more and more,
The east wind snarls and sneezes;
Through the joints of the quivering door
        The water wheezes.

The tip of each ivy-shoot
Writhes on its neighbour's face;
There is some hid dread afoot
        That we cannot trace.

Is it the spirit astray
Of the man at the house below
Whose coffin they took in to-day?
        We do not know.

~~
Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)
from Moments of Vision, 1917

[Poem is in the public domain in Canada, the United States, and the European Union]

Thomas Hardy biography

"A January Night" read by Jean Aked. Courtesy jeanakedpoetry.

Snow, Snow / George J. Dance

Snow, Snow

Snow, snow, get out of here;
Come again some other year.
I'd rather that the skies were clear.
Snow, snow, get out of here.

~~
George J. Dance, 2026

"Snow, Snow" by George J. Dance is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International Unported License. 

George J. Dance biography

Ser Armantio de Nicolao, Snowstorm aftermath in northern Virginia, 2009.

CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons.

Winter / Bernard Barton

Winter

Thou hast thy beauties: sterner ones, I own,
    Than those of thy precursors; yet to thee
    Belong the charms of solemn majesty
And naked grandeur. Awful is the tone
Of thy tempestuous nights, when clouds are blown
    By hurrying winds across the troubled sky;
    Pensive, when softer breezes faintly sigh
Through leafless boughs, with ivy overgrown.
Thou hast thy decorations too, although
    Thou art austere: thy studded mantle, gay
With icy brilliants, which as proudly glow
    As erst Golconda's; and thy pure array
Of regal ermine, when the drifted snow
    Envelopes nature; till her features seem
    Like pale, but lovely ones, seen when we dream.

~~
Bernard Barton (1784-1849) 

from Poems, 1825

[Poem is in the public domain worldwide]

Bernard Barton biography

WolfmanSF, Panoramic winter view of Crater Lake from Rim Village, 2012.

CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons.

The Year Has Changed Its Name / William Morris

The Year Has Changed Its Name

from The Earthly Paradise (1870)

The year has changed its name since that last tale;
Yet nought the prisoned spring doth that avail.
Deep buried under snow the country lies;
Made dim by whirling flakes the rook still flies
Southwest before the wind; noon is as still
As midnight on the southward-looking hill,
Whose slopes have heard so many words and loud
Since on the vine the woolly buds first showed.
The raven hanging o'er the farmstead gate,
While for another death his eye doth wait,
Hears but the muffled sound of crowded byre
And winds' moan round the wall. Up in the spire
The watcher set high o'er the half-hid town
Hearkens the sound of chiming bells fall down
Below him; and so dull and dead they seem
That he might well-nigh be amidst a dream
Wherein folk hear and hear not.

~~
William Morris (1834-1896)
from Through the Year with the Poets: January 

(edited by Oscar Fay Adams), 1886

[Poem is in the public domain worldwide]

William Morris biography

Jacob Spinks, Rook, December 2013. CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons.

A Song for the New Year / Barry Cornwall

A Song to the New Year

Hark!
The Old Year is gone!
And the young New Year is coming!
Through minutes, and days, and unknown skies,
My soul on her forward journey flies;
Over the regions of rain and snow;
And beyond where the wild March-trumpets blow:
And I see the meadows, all cowslip-strewn;
And I dream of the dove in the greenwood lone;
And the wild bee humming:—
And all because the New Year is coming!

The Winter is cold, the Winter is grey,
But he hath not a sound on his tongue to-day:
The son of the stormy Autumn, he
Totters about on a palsied knee,
With a frozen heart and a feeble head:
Let us pierce a barrel and drink him dead!
The fresh New Year is almost here;
Let us warm him with mistletoe boughs, my dear!
Let us welcome hither with songs and wine,
Who holdeth such joys in his arms divine!
What is the Past,— to you, or me,
But a thing that was, and was to be?
And now it is gone to a world unknown;
Its deeds are done; its flight is flown!

Hark to The Past! In a bitter tone,
It crieth, "The good Old Year is flown," —
The sire of a thousand thoughtful hours,
Of a thousand songs, of a thousand flowers!
Ah! why, thou ungrateful child of rhyme,
Rail'st thou at the deeds of our father Time?
Hath he not fed thee, day by day,
With fancies that soothe thy soul alway?
Hath he not 'wakened, with pleasant pain,
The Muse that slept in thy teeming brain?
Hath he not, — ah dost thou forget
All the amount of the mighty debt?

Hush, hush! The little I owe to Time
I'll pay him, some day, with a moody rhyme,
Full of phantasmas, dark and drear,
As the shadows thrown down by the old Old Year,
Dim as the echoes that lately fell
From the deep Night's funereal bell,
Sounding hollow o'er hill and vale,
Like the close of a mournful tale!
In the mean time,— speak, trump and drum!
The Year is gone! the Year is come!
The fresh New Year, the bright New Year,
That telleth of hope and joy, my dear!
Let us model our spirit to chance and change,
Let us lesson our spirit to hope, and range
Through pleasures to come,— through years unknown;
But never forget the time that's flown! 

~~
Barry Cornwall (1787-1874)
from English Songs, and other small poems, 1844

[Poem is in the public domain worldwide]

Barry Cornwall biography

George Henry Broughton (1833-1905), Party for New Year's Day in New Amsterdam, 1870.

Public domain, Wikimedia Commons,