New Year on Dartmoor

This poem by Sylvia Plath came as an inspiration to her as she was taking a walk with her small daughter in Dartmoor, some time in late December 1961. This poem came as a breakthrough in her career and marked the changes in her technique as she described the landscape in much more metaphoric ways than before. Hardly, any realistic adjectives were used to describe the scene.

The poem describes how a mom describes the scenery and the setting to her little child who is amazed and excited over the 'newness' of the coming here. The child is overjoyed to see all the sparkle but the mom knows the actual truth that all this 'glinting' and 'clinking' and cheers are quite shallow and the only truth behind them are the challenges and hardships that the New Year brings with it. The language bespeaks the heart of the mother speaking to the child and is at times sad and at times funny to acquiesce with her child.

New Year on Dartmoor
This is newness: every little tawdry
Obstacle glass-wrapped and peculiar,
Glinting and clinking in a saint's falsetto. Only you
Don't know what to make of the sudden slippiness,
The blind, white, awful, inaccessible slant.
There's no getting up it by the words you know.
No getting up by elephant or wheel or shoe.
We have only come to look. You are too new
To want the world in a glass hat.