New Every Morning

We’re just back from spending the day with our middle son and his family. I love this little display on a shelf in their lounge, especially (speaking as the mother of three boys) the pink angel!

I’m not a fan of new year resolutions. I prefer to try and start each day, rather than each year, afresh. I once learned off by heart a poem on this subject by Susan Coolidge, only to discover much later that the verse I learnt was only the final verse of a much longer poem. Here it is, in its entirety. If you find the time to read it, I hope you will enjoy it as much as I do. Happy new year to you all!


New Every Morning

Every morn is the world made new.
You who are weary of sorrow and sinning,
Here is a beautiful hope for you,—
A hope for me and a hope for you.

All the past things are past and over;
The tasks are done and the tears are shed.
Yesterday’s errors let yesterday cover;
Yesterday’s wounds, which smarted and bled,
Are healed with the healing which night has shed.

Yesterday now is a part of forever,
Bound up in a sheaf, which God holds tight,
With glad days, and sad days, and bad days, which never
Shall visit us more with their bloom and their blight,
Their fulness of sunshine or sorrowful night.

Let them go, since we cannot re-live them,
Cannot undo and cannot atone;
God in his mercy receive, forgive them!
Only the new days are our own;
To-day is ours, and to-day alone.

Here are the skies all burnished brightly,
Here is the spent earth all re-born,
Here are the tired limbs springing lightly
To face the sun and to share with the morn
In the chrism of dew and the cool of dawn.

Every day is a fresh beginning;
Listen, my soul, to the glad refrain,
And, spite of old sorrow and older sinning,
And puzzles forecasted and possible pain,
Take heart with the day, and begin again.

Susan Coolidge (1835-1905)