Compare nad contrast Ted Kooser's Years End with Richard Willbur's Years End - Essay Example

h the end, or “dying” of the year. We are not celebrating a beautiful winter day in Wilbur’s world, but the dying year and a dark night, and life is almost gone, frozen-over like a lake, with just a bit of life stirring under that icy barrier. Wilbur sees the end of life in all parts of winter and nature in the second stanza: fallen leaves frozen in the icy lake, almost life-like, but cemented, unmoving, into their “graved” locations, where they fell. Life and death in years past is the focus of the third stanza as he sees death in the life-print of ancient ferns, preserved as fossils in rock formations, now dead for millions of years, but alive, in a sense in their fossilization.

He thinks of mammoths forever frozen in ice formations, glaciers, perhaps, that slowly move, almost unnoticeable, “like palaces of patience, in the gray/And changeless lands of ice,” as they move with the ice. . We always want more time, and think of the future, but seldom pause to reflect on our lives, and the demise that awaits us all. We are concerned with burying the past and moving on, collecting time, demanding more time. That constant struggle with what will come, yet burdened with the reality of coming death.

The final imagery of a life-giving New-year’s bell fighting with the reality of fallen snows and death, shows a man who is close to death, and even as others see a new year coming, wrought with future and hope, he sees his life as past, and sees only the coldness of death awaiting him. In his shorter, yet no less poignant piece, also entitled “Year’s End,” Ted Kosser interestingly, also begins his end-of-year poem with the same word: “Now.” Both poets begin in the present, as those who have lived a long life tend to dwell.

There is not much use to living in the future when death approaches. Contemplation of one’s life lived, the past, seems more appropriate. As Wilbur, Kooser laments the fact that the seasons have a cycle, and a life-death cycle, and none of us can escape such a cycle. Where Wilbur focused more on the natural cycle of winter and death, Kosser simply hints at nature, noting “the seasons are closing their files on each of us.” More mundane images of life and memory are given--the mind of remembrance is like a file cabinet of heavy drawers , filled with our memories of the life we have lived.

His pen brings those fleeting remembrances back, described as “a few old papers” from the file cabinet of our minds. As he thinks back on his life well lived, his thoughts are taken to snippets in time, a lover from the past, a fleeting memory of a bicycle we once had. He equates these memories as equally valid, as time has