DEPRESSION AND HOPE

For some people, Christmas has been a miserable time, and there doesn’t seem much to look forward to in the new year.

If you’re one of those people, here’s the poet Thomas Hardy, expressing the depression of winter that he feels;  but then he is surprised by hope.

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,

His crypt the cloudy canopy,

The wind his death-lament.

The ancient pulse of germ and birth

Was shrunken hard and dry,

And every spirit upon earth

Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among

The bleak twigs overhead

In a full-hearted…