The new year is always accompanied by the same question: what really awaits us when the calendar changes? The need for predictions, wishes and reassurances has always accompanied the start of a new year. Gianni Rodari observe this collective ritual with clarity and irony, transforming it into a lesson in responsibility.
The new year by Gianni Rodari is a poem that talks about the willpower and ability of each individual to impact their own future. A text which, behind the light rhythm of the nursery rhyme, holds a profound lesson, valid for children but above all for adults.
The Maestro of Omegna is much more than a children’s author. He is a true master of life. With apparent simplicity he was able to interpret the great issues of human experience, always putting the most authentic values at the center: personal responsibility, trust in others, freedom of thought.
The poem is part of the collection Nursery rhymes in heaven and earth (Turin, Einaudi, 1960), one of the most representative books of Rodarian poetics. Here too, as often happens in his work, the content is high, but the language remains deliberately accessible, capable of speaking to everyone without sacrificing depth.
Reading and rereading this poem, especially at the beginning of a new year, means rediscovering the discreet strength of Gianni Rodari’s thought and his ability to transform a wish into a lesson in awareness.
The new year by Gianni Rodari
Guess what, I guess
you who read in destiny:
What will the new year be like?
Nice, ugly, or half and half?I find it printed in my big books
which will certainly have four seasons,
twelve months, each in its place,
a carnival and a mid-August holiday,
and the next day on Monday
will always have a Tuesday.I can’t find anything more written at the moment
in the destiny of the new year:
for the rest also this year
it will be as men will do it.
The future is not predicted, it is built
The new year by Gianni Rodari entrusts an essential truth to a few verses: the future is not written in any mysterious destiny, but takes shape from the choices of human beings. Behind the light appearance of the nursery rhyme, poetry dismantles the illusion of prediction and restores centrality to individual and collective responsibility.
Rodari does not deny the uncertainty of tomorrow, but rejects the idea that it must be endured. The year to come will be exactly what men know how to do with it.
The initial question and the human need for certainty
The poem opens with a question that belongs to every era. The invocation to the fortune teller represents the universal desire to know in advance what awaits us. Asking whether the year will be “good, bad or half and half” means seeking reassurance in the face of the unknown, delegating the sense of the future to an external voice.
Rodari intercepts this need precisely, but exposes it with irony. The fortune teller is not a solemn or mysterious figure, but rather an almost daily interlocutor, who immediately makes the fragility of every prediction evident.
False certainties and the reality of time returning
In the second part, the soothsayer lists what is really written: the seasons, the months, the holidays, the succession of days. It is a simple, almost obvious list, and for this reason disarming. Rodari reduces destiny to what is cyclical and inevitable, showing how the only certainties are those already known and shared by everyone.
Time, in this poem, does not promise anything extraordinary. It flows according to a repeating order, indifferent to hopes and fears. Everything that is often passed off as a revelation of the future dissolves into an elementary observation.
The new year has human responsibility
The profound meaning of the poem is concentrated in the last lines, when Rodari states that, for the rest, the new year “will be as men make it”. Here the nursery rhyme turns into a civil lesson. Destiny is not an external force, but a daily construction made of choices, behaviors, relationships.
Gianni Rodari entrusts this truth to an accessible language, so that the message does not remain confined to abstract reflection. Every reader, child or adult, is called to recognize himself as an active part of the time to come. The new year does not arrive already defined: it takes shape through human actions.
In this sense, The new year it is much more than a wish poem. It is an invitation to awareness, an ethical reminder that change is not expected, but is achieved.
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