New Year's Eve

In this tender, musically-rhymed meditation on time's passage, Eugene Field captures the peculiar magic of that liminal night when one year dies and another is born. The poem moves through memories and hopes with the quiet intimacy of someone speaking to a beloved in a dim room, balancing melancholy for what has passed with quiet anticipation for what may come. Field's characteristic gift for melody serves him well here, each line seeming to want to be set to music. The poem does not grandly philosophize about time but instead rests in the specific, human feeling of standing at the threshold between the known past and unknown future. It is a poem for anyone who has ever felt the strange weight of midnight on December 31st, that moment when the closing year seems to ask us what we have done with it, and what we hope to become.