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Elizabeth Anderson

These Fragments I have Shored Against My Ruins...
-- T.S. Eliot, "What The Thunder Said", The Wasteland

Welcome the
New Century

The Darkling Thrush
Thomas Hardy

I leant upon a coppice gate
When frost was spectre-grey
And winter's dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems
scored the sky,
like strings of broken lyres.
And all mankind that haunted nigh
had sought their household fires.

The land's sharp features seemed to be
The Century's corpse outleant
Its crypt the cloudy canopy
The wind its death lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
was shrunken hard and dry,
and every spirit upon earth
seemed fervourless as I.

When all at once arose among
the bleak twigs overhead
in a full hearted even-song
of joy illimited,
and aged thrush, frail gaunt and small
in blast-beruffled plume,
had chosen thus to fling his soul
upon the growing doom.

So little cause for carollings
of such ecstatic sound
was written on terrestrial things
afar or nigh around,
that I could think there trembled through
his happy good-night air,
some blessed hope whereof he knew
and I was unaware.