Looking for a way to make your New Year's Celebration extra special?
Include poetry in your festivities!
Obviously!
When I shared a few Christmas poems for your family, I mentioned how inserting a poem or two into your celebrations doesn't take much time or effort. And yet, the rewards of poetry are numerous.
I scoured the shelves for some good New Year's poetry to share with you. There are not many in the public domain (which is all I can publish in full here) to which I felt kids would enthusiastically respond. But I found a few to recommend.
However, if none of these strike your fancy, the holiday break from school is the perfect time to spend some time in the library stacks, check out a poetry book, along with these New Year's Day picture books, and find a poem that inspires you to start the New Year out right. And here's a secret: The poem doesn't even have to be about the New Year.
So I say, blow off the dust of time! Read and recite as you count down to the new year! Commit to memorizing a poem for the new beginning. Throw up your hat, blow your noise maker and toss that confetti for these New Year's poems kids and families will love!
Suggestions for how to incorporate poetry into your festivities:
Sequential! Take turns reading a poem aloud every hour as you count down to midnight.
Collaborate! Everyone can read one verse of a long poem when the clock strikes midnight.
Surprise! Everyone chooses a poem in secret and then shares it with the family at the breakfast table the next morning.
Here are a few of my favorite classic poems for New Year's Eve and New Year's Day. Below these poems I have a form where you can request a printable containing these poems and few additional classic New Year's Day poems.
The Year
by Ella Wheeler Wilcox
What can be said in New Year rhymes,
That's not been said a thousand times?
The new years come, the old years go,
We know we dream, we dream we know.
We rise up laughing with the light,
We lie down weeping with the night.
We hug the world until it stings,
We curse it then and sigh for wings.
We live, we love, we woo, we wed,
We wreathe our brides, we sheet our dead.
We laugh, we weep, we hope, we fear,
And that's the burden of the year.
*** The following short poem is great for New Year's Morning.
January
by William Carlos Williams
Again I reply to the triple winds
running chromatic fifths of derision
outside my window:
Play louder.
You will not succeed. I am
bound more to my sentences
the more you batter at me
to follow you.
And the wind,
as before, fingers perfectly
its derisive music.
*** This next one is great for resolutions!
It Couldn't Be Done
by Edgar GuestSomebody said that it couldn’t be done,
But he with a chuckle replied
That “maybe it couldn’t,” but he would be one
Who wouldn’t say so till he’d tried.
So he buckled right in with the trace of a grin
On his face. If he worried he hid it.
He started to sing as he tackled the thing
That couldn’t be done, and he did it.
Somebody scoffed: “Oh, you’ll never do that;
At least no one ever has done it”;
But he took off his coat and he took off his hat,
And the first thing we knew he’d begun it.
With a lift of his chin and a bit of a grin,
Without any doubting or quiddit,
He started to sing as he tackled the thing
That couldn’t be done, and he did it.
There are thousands to tell you it cannot be done,
There are thousands to prophesy failure;
There are thousands to point out to you one by one,
The dangers that wait to assail you.
But just buckle in with a bit of a grin,
Just take off your coat and go to it;
Just start in to sing as you tackle the thing
That “cannot be done,” and you’ll do it.
Also included in the printable:
- "New Year's Morning" by Helen Hunt Jackson
- "In Memoriam, [Ring out, wild bells]" by Alfred Lord Tennyson
- "The Garden Year" by Sara Coleridge
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