At the Entering of the New Year by Thomas Hardy

Lyrics

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 dеlight As Time unrobed the Youth of Promisе Hailed by our sanguine sight 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."