This fair folk
I found it surprisingly hard to track down a poem for New Year's Day. I thought there would be lots - have I missed an obvious one? Anyway, here's a piece from the opening of the long fourteenth-century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, in the translation from Middle English by Marie Borroff. Makes me nostalgic actually for so hardy a host.
…all this fair folk in their first age were still.
Happiest of mortal kind,
King noblest famed of will;
You would now go far to find
So hardy a host on hill.
While the New Year was new, but yesternight come,
This fair folk at feast two-fold was served,
When the king and his company were come in together,
The chanting in chapel achieved and ended.
Clerics and all the court acclaimed the glad season,
Cried Noel anew, good news to men.