New Yearʼs Poems

A likely source for modeling the New Yearʼs ode, which was available to Ruskin in the Herne Hill library, was the Evangelical Magazine, which regularly included New Yearʼs poems in the “Poetry” section for the January issue. Starting with the magazineʼs volume 1 (1793), monthly issues featured a brief one‐ to two‐page section entitled “Poetry”, consisting of contributions by readers, signed only with their initials, aliases, or home locations. These small “Poetry” sections, which were included in each monthly issue, may have served Ruskin as a model for his verse anthologies in his Red Books, small collections that he entitled “Poetry” similarly to the header used for the collections in the Evangelical Magazine (see, e.g., MS I Poetry Anthology).

From the beginnings of the magazine, the editors encouraged readers to contribute to all departments, especially with “short pieces” such as poems (“Preface” [January 1794]). Readers responded with verse in a variety of genres—descriptive pieces, elegies, epigraphs, devotional poems, hymns, psalm paraphrases, reflections on Bible verses, doctrinal arguments, “thing” poems, as well as seasonal poems, including Christmas poems for the December issue, and New Yearʼs poems for the January issue. The final issue of volume one (December 1793) featured contributorsʼ poems on the Nativity, while the opening issue of volume two (January 1794) presented contributorsʼ poems on the New Year; and that pattern was sustained in subsequent volumes. In each annual volume, the New Year holiday appears to have invited more verse commentary compared to Christmas (and other holy days are rarely noticed at all). New Yearʼs poems are also often complemented with reflections in prose in other sections of the issue, as well. For example, in the January 1794 issue, an essay urges readers to solemnize their minds “when . . . brought to the close of the year” since, despite all “sagacity”, one “cannot ascertain what events may befal me in the progress of that upon which, at present, I am about to enter!” (“Suitable Meditation for the Beginning of the Year”, 29).

The New Yearʼs poems are religious, like almost all of the poetry published in the magazine, and they tend to develop predictable themes—for example, the shortness of time in which to live a holy life; praise of the Creator for time and the seasons; the superiority of spiritual gifts over material holiday presents. Ruskinʼs New Yearʼs poems do not typically reflect these religious and admonitory themes.

One of the first New Yearʼs poems, featured in the January issue of volume two, was authored by a writer using the pen name Aliquis—a contributor included among the magazineʼs first poets in volume one, and continuing as a reliable presence for years afterward, leading one to speculate that the writer may have been a member of the editorial staff, perhaps one among the twenty‐four Ministers from multiple denominations who founded the magazine (Aliquis, “The New Year”). Aliquis went on to supply a New Yearʼs poem annually for almost four decades, the poetʼs last ode being published in 1832. The earlier New Yearʼs poems by Aliquis, similarly to those contributed by other poets to the January issues, are lyric “reflections” and “thoughts” of a speaker, looking back on oneʼs shortcomings in the preceding year and resolving to do better in the coming year. Some of Aliquisʼs earlier efforts stand out from the couplets and quatrains that typify the other poems, by aspiring to formal complexity with a six‐line stanza that alternates quatrameter rhyming couplets in lines 1–2 and 4–5 with rhyming trimeter lines 3 and 6. Then, with the New Yearʼs poem for 1804—notably, the year of the “Great Terror”, when British citizens watched with horror as Napoleon massed troops and a flotilla on the French coast of the English Channel, in preparation for invasion—Aliquis expanded the poem from a lyric reflection into an ode, consisting of three divisions of thought subtitled “Reflection”, “Contrition”, and “Praise”—each section composed using distinct metrical patterns (Aliquis, “Ode for the New Year”; on the “Great Terror”, see Ruskinʼs poem, “The Defiance of War”).

Aliquis goes on to elaborate this ode structure in New Yearʼs poems for subsequent January issues through 1832, most laid out in this ambitious multipart format. Accordingly, for those January issues, Aliquisʼs ode either fills the entirety of the normally modest one‐ to two‐page monthly allotment to poetry or it bursts the limits, allowing for contributions by others, as well, to occupy several pages of anthology. Presumably, in order to have been showcased on this scale, Aliquisʼs niche performance was welcomed as a holiday tradition by the magazineʼs editors and readers. Thus, while nothing is known of Aliquisʼs identity, this poetʼs career perhaps presents an example of an amateur poet of moderate skill who achieved modest fame within a pious and respectable circle—a possible way of viewing Ruskinʼs career, had he stayed on his path of writing verse for the annuals.

To come.