New year, new thinking
Poets past and present help us look beyond old challenges to the better world we can achieve.
Eric Adams holds up a framed photo of his mother at his swearing-in as New York mayor in Times Square, Jan. 1, 2022.
AP
As 2021 gives way to 2022, it’s not always easy to put into words the aspirations that well up. But sometimes poets express what we can’t.
In 1850, Britain’s new poet laureate, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, wrote “Ring Out, Wild Bells.” His poem imagines that the church bells marking the new year will “Ring out the old, ring in the new / ... Ring out the false, ring in the true.”
In words that resonate today he hears the bells pealing with hope:
Ring out false pride in place and blood
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.
Ring out old shapes of foul disease; ...
Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand.
Today poet Amanda Gorman employs the language of the 21st century but expresses the same conviction that good lies ahead. At last year’s presidential inaugural, the 22-year-old Ms. Gorman roused listeners with her poem “The Hill We Climb.” To mark 2022, she wrote "New Day's Lyric."
A challenging 2021, she says, has only made us stronger. She writes, in part:
Tethered by this year of yearning,
We are learning
That though we weren’t ready for this,
We have been readied by it.
Steadily we vow that no matter
How we are weighed down,
We must always pave a way forward.
This hope is our door, our portal.
Acknowledge the past, she says, but don’t live there:
So let us not return to what was normal,
But reach toward what is next.
What was cursed, we will cure.
What was plagued, we will prove pure. ...
Come over, join this day just begun.
For wherever we come together,
We will forever overcome.
New York City’s new mayor, Eric Adams, isn’t a poet, but he knew how to use stirring language to put a punctuation mark on his approach to 2022. The mayor is the son of a housecleaner, a single mother, and his own story speaks of challenges faced – and defeated.
In a New Year’s Day speech on his first day in office, he conceded, “The crisis tells us that it is in charge.” But, the mayor defiantly vowed, “we will not be controlled by crisis.”
Spoken with the enthusiasm of a newcomer who brings fresh, inspired thinking. And that’s something all of us can contribute in the year ahead.