I don’t know about you but at this time of year my thoughts can become a tad gloomy, morbid even.  I know I am not alone in this, whether it’s the missing faces at the family meals; the fact that disruption to routine inevitably finds me staring at a chunk of time with no allotted activity except thinking; or the simple acknowledgement that lack of daylight has very real psychological and physiological implications.

“In the real dark night of the soul it is always 3 o’clock in the morning.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up originally Esquire magazine, February 1936

So, I was quite cheered this morning when perusing one of my poetry books to find this: –

Cock-Crow

Out of the wood of thoughts that grows by night

To be cut down by the sharp axe of light –

Out of the night, two cocks together crow,

Cleaving the darkness with a silver blow:

And bright before my eyes twin trumpeters stand,

Heralds of splendour, one at either hand,

Each facing each as in a coat of arms:

The milkers lace their boots up at the farms.

Edward Thomas, from The Rattle Bag anthology edited by Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes, Faber and Faber 1982.