Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

John Frederick Nims’ "New Year's Eve" is a sweeping meditation on time, longing, and transience, carried forward by an effusive, almost breathless lyricism that captures both the revelry and the existential melancholy of the year’s turning. The poem’s structure mimics the movement of New Year's Eve itself—an initial rush of sensation and festivity, a moment of reflection, and finally, a haunting awareness of what remains unresolved. Throughout, Nims entwines personal and collective experience, weaving together the intimacy of a name called in the night with the cosmic scale of time’s relentless passage.

The poem begins in a moment of threshold: "Midnight the years last day the last high hour the verge where the dancers comet." The absence of punctuation accelerates the line, reinforcing a sense of urgency and momentum, as if the entire poem is swept into the forward motion of time. The phrase "the verge where the dancers comet" is particularly striking, merging human festivity with celestial movement, suggesting both a fleeting, celebratory brilliance and an inevitable fading away. Nims immediately extends this cosmic imagery into the personal: "(loved water lapsing under the bridge and blood dear blood by the bridged aorta where the dreaming soul leans distant-eyed long-watching the flood and its spoil borne seaward).” The repetition of "bridge"—both literal and metaphorical—creates a sense of liminality, a crossing point between past and future, life and death, self and memory.

From this grand, near-mystical opening, Nims shifts into the immediate scene: "and I one fleck on the numbered face one dot on the star-aswarming heaven stand here in this street of all our streets of all our times this moment only the bells the snow the neon faces each our own but estranged and fleeing." The speaker acknowledges his own smallness—"one fleck on the numbered face," suggesting both the face of a clock and the vastness of the night sky—but the moment is not just individual, it is part of a collective experience, marked by "all our streets of all our times." The enjambment and piling of clauses create a sensation of restless movement, mirroring the flow of people and events around him. The phrase "each our own but estranged and fleeing" is particularly poignant, capturing the paradox of New Year's Eve—a celebration of togetherness that often emphasizes, instead, the distance between us.

This distance is made painfully tangible in the vignette that follows: "from a bar all tinkle and red fluorescence a boy in a tux with tie uneven puppy-clumsy with auldlangsyning plaintive so droll came crying Sally Salleee again and Saalleee louder a violin teased he passed in laughter." The boy, disheveled and "puppy-clumsy," calls out for Sally—a name that becomes an emblem of lost connection, of an absent or unreachable presence. His drunken plaintiveness, the slurred insistence of his call, underscores a deeper yearning beneath the night’s merriment. The moment is humorous but also deeply human, as New Year's Eve often stirs up nostalgia, regret, and unresolved desires.

But the poem does not leave this longing confined to a single reveler; instead, it expands into something universal: "yet under the heart of each up vein up brain and loud in the lonely spirit a-rang desire for Sallys name or another name or a street or season not to be conjured by any horn nor flavored gin nor the flung confetti." The "desire for Sally’s name or another name" transcends individual love or loss, becoming the yearning for something irretrievable—a past moment, a place, a feeling that cannot be recovered through the night's rituals of noise and celebration. The disillusionment here is stark: neither music ("horn") nor alcohol ("flavored gin") nor festivity ("flung confetti") can summon back what has been lost.

The poem closes on an even broader scale, moving beyond the streets and bars to a cosmic, omniscient perspective: "o watcher upover the world look down through gale of stars to the globes blue hover and see arising in troubled mist from firefly towns and the dark between them the waif appeal from lackland hearts to Sallys name or perhaps anothers." The "watcher upover the world" suggests a godlike or celestial observer, looking down at the Earth, which hovers like "the globes blue hover." The phrase "firefly towns and the dark between them" evokes a planet seen from afar, where small, scattered lights illuminate the loneliness between them. The "waif appeal from lackland hearts" suggests a plea from those who feel unmoored, who lack a place or an anchor in the vast, drifting passage of time.

The final lines bring the poem full circle: "we shall never be never be calm not we who have seen for an instant you you standing at night in the cloudlit rose of cities or underblue of a womans lashes crying where we wandered veldt and highland drift and doom were the loves we lovered." The phrase "never be calm" suggests that once one has glimpsed something extraordinary—whether love, beauty, or revelation—there is no returning to a state of peace. The shifting imagery—"cloudlit rose of cities," "underblue of a woman’s lashes," "veldt and highland"—evokes places, lovers, and moments that have passed but still haunt the speaker’s mind. The phrase "the loves we lovered" is particularly striking, transforming "love" from a noun into an active verb, emphasizing the lived experience of it, the intensity and the weight of memory.

"New Year's Eve" is, at its core, a poem about time’s passage and the restless, unfulfilled longing that accompanies it. Nims captures the essence of New Year's Eve not merely as a holiday but as a human condition—our perpetual attempt to make meaning of time, to hold onto what is slipping away, to fill the absences that define us. Through his dense, musical phrasing, he weaves together the personal and the universal, the individual reveler and the overarching gaze of the stars, culminating in a meditation on memory, loss, and the impossibility of ever truly being at peace with the past.

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