New Year's Eve, 1913

O, Cartmel bells ring soft to-night,
And Cartmel bells ring clear,
But I lie far away to-night,
Listening with my dear;

Listening in a frosty land
Where all the bells are still
And the small-windowed bell-towers stand
Dark under heath and hill.

I thought that, with each dying year,
As long as life should last
The bells of Cartmel I should hear
Ring out an aged past:

The plunging, mingling sounds increase
Darkness's depth and height,
The hollow valley gains more peace
And ancientness to-night:

The loveliness, the fruitfulness,
The power of life lived there
Return, revive, more closely press
Upon that midnight air.

But many deaths have place in men
Before they come to die;
Joys must be used and spent, and then
Abandoned and passed by.

Earth is not ours; no cherished space
Can hold us from life's flow,
That bears us thither and thence by ways
We knew not we should go.

O, Cartmel bells ring loud, ring clear,
Through midnight deep and hoar,
A year new-born, and I shall hear
The Cartmel bells no more.

Gordon Bottomley

Gordon Bottomley was an influential British poet and playwright associated with the Georgian Poetry movement. Born in Keighley, Yorkshire, he wrote many plays in verse and was known for his diverse thematic range and vivid imagery. Despite battling illness for much of his life, Bottomley's works, such as „The Crier by Night“, left a significant mark on early 20th-century English literature.

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New-Year's Eve

Good old days--dear old days
When my heart beat high and bold--
When the things of earth seemed full of life,
And the future a haze of gold!
Oh, merry was I that winter night,
And gleeful our little one's din,
And tender the grace of my darling's face
As we watched the new year in.
But a voice--a spectre's, that mocked at love--
Came out of the yonder hall;
"Tick-tock, tick-tock!" 't was the solemn clock
That ruefully croaked to all.
Yet what knew we of the griefs to be
In the year we longed to greet?
Love--love was the theme of the sweet, sweet dream
I fancied might never fleet!

But the spectre stood in that yonder gloom,
And these were the words it spake,
"Tick-tock, tick-tock"--and they seemed to mock
A heart about to break.

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New Year's Eve

It's cruel cold on the water-front, silent and dark and drear;
Only the black tide weltering, only the hissing snow;
And I, alone, like a storm-tossed wreck, on this night of the glad New Year,
Shuffling along in the icy wind, ghastly and gaunt and slow.

They're playing a tune in McGuffy's saloon, and it's cheery and bright in there
(God! but I'm weak - since the bitter dawn, and never a bite of food);
I'll just go over and slip inside - I mustn't give way to despair -
Perhaps I can bum a little booze if the boys are feeling good.

They'll jeer at me, and they'll sneer at me, and they'll call me a whiskey soak;
("Have a drink? Well, thankee kindly, sir, I don't mind if I do.")
A drivelling, dirty gin-joint fiend, the butt of the bar-room joke;
Sunk and sodden and hopeless -...

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At The Entering Of The New Year

I (OLD STYLE)

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 delight,
As Time unrobed the Youth of Promise
Hailed by our sanguine sight.

II (NEW STYLE)

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;
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In entering the town, where the bright river
Shrinks in its white stone bed, old thoughts return
Of how a quiet queen was nurtured here
In the pale, shadowed ruin on the height;
Of how, when the hoar town was new and clean
And had not grown a part of the gaunt fells
That peered down into it, the burghers wove
On their small, fireside looms green, famous webs
To cling on lissome, tower-dwelling ladies
Who rode the hills swaying like green saplings,
Or mask tall, hardy outlaws from pursuit
Down beechen caverns and green under-lights,
(The rude, vain looms are gone, their beams are broken;
Their webs are now not seen, but memory
Still tangles in their mesh the dews they swept
Like ruby sparks, the lights they took, the scents

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The Song Of The Bells.

    He frowned and shook his snowy head.
    "Those clanging bells! they deafen quite
    With their unmeaning song," he said.
    "I'm weary of it all to-night -
    The gladness, sadness. I'm so old
    I have no sympathy to spare,
    My heart has grown so hard and cold,
    So full of self, I do not care
    How many laugh, or long, or grieve
    In all the world this Christmas eve.

    "There was a time long, long ago -
    They take our best, the passing years -
    For the old life, and faith, and glow.
    I'd give - what's on my cheek? Not tears!
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    Till eyes turn on me gratefully -
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New Year's Eve: A Waking Dream

I have not any fearful tale to tell
Of fabled giant or of dragon-claw,
Or bloody deed to pilfer and to sell
To those who feed, with such, a gaping maw;
But what in yonder hamlet there befell,
Or rather what in it my fancy saw,
I will declare, albeit it may seem
Too simple and too common for a dream.

Two brothers were they, and they sat alone
Without a word, beside the winter's glow;
For it was many years since they had known
The love that bindeth brothers, till the snow
Of age had frozen it, and it had grown
An icy-withered stream that would not flow;
And so they sat with warmth about their feet
And ice about their hearts that would not beat.

And yet it was a night for quiet hope:--
A night the very last of all the year
To many a youthful...

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