Song of the Day - 1st January

Happy New Year everyone!

I hope you are not too worse for weather after the celebrations of last night.

Today's Song of the Day is the first of two New Year's Day themed songs. it is a setting of a poem by Ella Wheeler Wilcox called "New Year Resolve". On the theme of new year, new life, new hope, it exhorts the reader to put behind them errors and failures of the past and press on with a new hope in the new year.

New Year Resolve

By Ella Wheeler Wilcox

As the dead year is clasped by a dead December,

So let your dead sins with your dead days lie.

A new life is yours and a new hope.Remember

We build our own ladders to climb to the sky.

Stand out in the sunlight of promise, forgetting

Whatever the past held of sorrow and wrong.

We waste half our strength in a useless regretting;

We sit by old tombs in the dark too long.

Have you missed in your aim? Well, the mark is still shining.

Did you faint in the race? Well, take breath for the next.

Did the clouds drive you back? But see yonder their lining.

Were you tempted and fell? Let it serve for a text.

As each year hurries by, let it join that procession

Of skeleton shapes that march down to the past,

While you take your place in the line of progression,

With your eyes to the heavens, your face to the blast.

I tell you the future can hold no terrors

For any sad soul while the stars revolve,

If he will stand firm on the grave of his errors,

And instead of regretting - resolve, resolve!

It is never too late to begin rebuilding,

Though all into ruins your life seems hurled;

For see! how the light of the New Year is gilding

The wan, worn face of the bruised old world.