A new year's poem by the Swedish poetess Sophia Elisabet Brenner

SONNET

To her dear Husband  Deputy Judge

ELIAS BRENNER,

Upon the first day of January Anno 1691

My Friend! I ought of course on New Year gifts be musing

To the extent my powers/ likewise my will were good/

And had not lack of means for this in my way stood/

Then keenly I would seek and something new be choosing/

Instead my thoughts are fixed on bounties in full ration/

Which are not found on sale in every grocer’s stall

And which by women once were scarcely grasped at all/

I will in well-turned rhymes a dozen lines/ now fashion/

I think that such a gift to you will give most pleasure/

Which I alone and no one else have laboured on/

For secondhand things you find irksome beyond measure/

And I think likewise and with you agree thereon

Nor will I e’er relinquish the idea I treasure

That borrowed feathers/ least of all befit a Swan.

Whoever would reflect on where time’s always stealing

Should note most carefully our newly started year/

It greys so fast/ as snow and frost are both revealing/

It ages even while its birth-day is still here.

It first begins today/ and yet our end presages

The more we gather years/ the fewer are our days/

Eternal God most true/ no year turns back the pages/

Help us in time to avert from this fair world our gaze!

Teach us to well observe how short is our life’s season/

How our approaching end each instant makes us feel/

To see in all combined there is both rhyme and reason/

Our life is frail as glass and time’s cogged wheel of steel.