I stood on a tower in the wet, And New Year and Old Year met, And winds were roaring and blowing: And I said, "O years, that meet in tears, Have ye aught that is worth the knowing? Science enough and exploring, Wanderers coming and going, Matter enough for deploring, But aught that is worth the knowing?"

The speaker marks the turning of the year from a bleak, rain-swept height, using the meeting of “New Year and Old Year” as a symbol for human retrospection and uncertainty about what time yields. The repeated question—whether there is “aught…worth the knowing”—sets scientific progress (“Science enough and exploring”) and restless movement (“Wanderers coming and going”) against moral or existential insight. The tone is skeptical and elegiac: knowledge and activity abound, yet they may not answer the deeper hunger for meaning. The image of years meeting “in tears” suggests that time’s passage is inseparable from loss, and that the most urgent “knowledge” is wisdom rather than information.