Poem for the New Year

Somehow Thomas Hardy's pessimism with just a dash of unrealistic optimism seems right for this New Year.
Welcome 2012!

To commemorate the end of the nineteenth century Hardy composed a poem originally titled By the Century's Deathbed later renamed The Darkling Thrush. Though written several weeks earlier, it is dated 31 December 1900.

His bleak wintry take on the nineteenth century is interrupted by the cheerful song of a thrush and the poem ends with a hint of hope:

So little cause for carolings
0000Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
0000Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
0000His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
0000And I was unaware.