'We know we dream, we dream we know'

 Year's end, and I'm still coughing and still prostrated by this wretched 'cold' or whatever it is.
I thought I might post a poem – last year it was Richard Wilbur's wonderful Year's End – but this year it's going to be, of all the unlikely candidates, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, whose poem 'The Year' seems to me blessedly free of the moralising good cheer we'd expect from this hugely popular (in her day) versifier. In fact, this one seems notably clear-eyed and unsentimental – and rather a good poem...

What can be said in New Year rhymes,
That's not been said a thousand times?

The new years come, the old years go,
We know we dream, we dream we know.

We rise up laughing with the light,
We lie down weeping with the night.

We hug the world until it stings,
We curse it then and sigh for wings.

We live, we love, we woo, we wed,
We wreathe our brides, we sheet our dead.

We laugh, we weep, we hope, we fear,
And that's the burden of the year.