Christmas in Poetry

...Robert Herriek in the seventeenth century sends a "pretty child" to visit "His Saviour, a Child," bearing a flower to place on "His bib, or stomacher" and "a whistle new,/made of a clean straight oaten reed...

...After their stay in Washington, D.C., the representatives were flown to Edwards Air Force Base in California to witness flight demonstrations of the two aircraft...

...inducement over this sale, the representatives were actually invited to participate with the USAF in the final evaluation of the aircraft...

...He will wait until time, in the shape of a train, reverses and runs back into itself, to replenish the present with the past as his words have done in the poem...

...Clare, after a long evocation of old Christmas customs in "Christmas Time," realizes how isolate he is in his appreciation: " . . . soon the poet's song will be/The only refuge they (the customs) can find...

...Middleton in The Christmas Book o[ Legends and Stories, New York: Lothrop, Lee & Shepard, 1944...

...Otherwise, Patchen implies, we (and poetry with us surely) risk madness: They are blowing out the candles, Mary . . . The world is a thing gone mad tonight...

...Soon an age of reasonable satire reshaped English letters...

...Auden's long Christmas Oratorio, For the Time Being, undercut as it is by his knowledge that it's just a seasonal ceremony, ineffective on the world's stage, still is informed by Auden's belief in a love that thwarts human understanding, that makes what little we have sufficient for the time being...

...Though it seems incidental, Christmas is catalytic in Tennyson's poem...

...An old Spanish carol adds "One small fish from the river" and "One wild bee from the heather" to the family of animals at the manger (trans...

...but the bells persist and bring him back to his faith in peace on earth...

...This is what Kenneth Patchen does in "I Have Lighted the Candles, Mary," when in a "bitter world" he sees "the cold, swollen face of war lean in the window...

...And poems like Hopkins' "The Blessed Virgin Compared to the Air We Breathe" illustrate the vitality of the tradition beyond its medieval sources...

...Beyond this, Giorgio Orelli's "Cfiristmas 1944" shows us a world in which nothing human remains, nothing of the blood that Christ and men have shed: _9 . . bewildered bells tremble _ 9 night falls like so many other nights uselessly luminous in the vast embrace of the moon...

...He declares "The ceremony of innocence.., drowned" and envisions a "rough beast" that "slouches toward Bethlehem to be born" as "The Second Coming...

...Through such poems and many others on into our _9 time--through this celebratory tradition of Christmas poetry--runs an awareness of the paradoxes innate to Christ's birthday...

...Each aircraft will cost $4.5 million...

...Christmas, by its nature, requires attention, whether from the skeptical or faithful...

...The modern poet may not be George Herbert shepherding his thoughts, words and deeds, singing to a sun whose beams he wishes would twine with his breast, "till beams sing and music shine" ("Christmas...

...There he rails against the Civil War...

...There hadn't been a real tradition of Christmas poetry in early America, where Puritan churchmen discouraged Christmas festivity, although many Puritan churchgoers did their utmost to ignore the ban...

...Some modern poets, however, have revivified the celebratory tradition of Christmas poetry...

...And in the first American carol, "Jesous Ahatonhia," credited to the seventeenth-century Jesuit martyr Jean de Br6beuf and wr~_tten in the Huron I JOHH DRUSKA is a writer who currently teaches high school in Indianapolis...

...Sweden is offering their new Saab-seania Viggen jet fighter, and France the Mirage F1/M53 built by Dassault-Breguet...

...In Drummond's "The Shepherd's Song," "springs ran nectar, honey dropped from trees...

...Hopkins asks in his poem that the mother who "came to mould" Christ's limbs be "my atmosphere": If I have understood, She holds high motherhood Towards all our ghostly good And plays in grace her part About man's breathing heart, Laying, like air's fine flood, The deathdanee in his blood...

...Patrick Kavanagh manages, if only for the moment, to return himself to "A Christmas Childhood," where his father plays the melodeon and 20 December 1974:262 mother milks the cows as Kavanagh admires the unworldly beauty of his common Irish landscape: One side of the potato-pits was white with frost-How wonderful that was, how wonderful...

...The re-occurrence of Christmas through "In Memoriam" heightens Tennyson's grief with childhood memories, reminds him of loss and his regret's mutation, and at last charts his movement beyond memory to "new unhallowed ground...

...This is an indication of what is fully at stake in this arms deal...

...Yet men of good will and all faiths, or no faith, still respond to Christmas in their poetry...

...Commonweal: 26J...

...II I THE WAR SYNDICATE DOUGLAS MATTERN In a season of p e a c e , a report on the armaments r a c e During September of 1974, representatives from four NATO countries--Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Norway--arrived in the United States to discuss what Europeans have called the arms deal of the century...

...Other conventions like love, after all, allowed some of them similar liberties...

...Christmas, once regarded as miraculous, is especially now merely ironic...

...In the former the speaker appears as a miner in a nightmarish "earthen womb," part of which he furnishes with Victoriana to receive a love who is the one Solid the spaces lean on, envious...

...So fair a fancy few would weave/In these years...

...Not Milton hastening his Muse to beat "star-led wizards" to the child "And lay (thy humble ode) lowly at His Bless'd feet" ("Ode on the Morning of Christ's Nativity...

...The selection will be made sometime in mid-January by the U.S...

...And when we put our ears to the paling-post The music that came out was magical...

...Poets more isolated from their society or closer to the folk (and so perhaps to the source of medieval faith), like Clare and Hardy, catch something of the ancient impulse to celebrate Christmas...

...Not even Clare, creating in his song a "refuge" for Christmas' ancient rites...

...by J.E...

...quoted in The Story of the Carol, New York: Scribner's, 1911) In another sixteenth-century carol, French shepherds (Margot, Cocquart, et...

...In the latter grotesque visions of "grey birds," "ovens" and a "holocaust" lead to the speaker's identification with a "golden child the world will kill and eat...

...Acting as a consortium, the representatives are shopping for an aircraft to replace their aging Lockheed F-104G fighters built in the early 1960s...

...officials give a short-term sales projection of 1,500 for this type of aircraft, including 350 to the consortium, 500 to what are termed third-category countries both inside and outside of NATO, and 650 to the U.S...

...Longterm sales estimates are conservatively set at 3,000, which, with maintenance contracts and supplies, could total $20 billion for the overall program...

...Another war later Jeffers looks at "veils under veils of the vanished England" and discovers the "seas netted with ambushes/ and the skies falling...

...While this kind of assertive rebirth i s hardly commonplace in more recent poetry, the role Christmas plays in this poem, the way it plays through the poem causing occasional reflection, is distinctly modem...

...Or the girl in Randall Jarrell's "The Night Before the Night Before Christmas" who has lost her mother and favorite squirrel, and who drifts into a vision of fields where "not one thing . . . knows/It is almost Christmas" and of her death: "She and her brother floating up from the snow" to become "the wings of the bird of snow...

...There is James Wright who confronts a ghost and his own death in "A Christmas Greeting," and is "sick and alone" somewhere "past the hidden graves/Of Chippewas and Norwegians" in "Having Lost My Sons, I Confront the Wreckage of the Moon: Christmas 1960...

...In "Holy Innocents" Robert Lowell symbolizes the year 1945 as an oxcart laboring uphill: If they (the oxen) die As Jesus, in the harness, who will mourn...

...28) Hecht's poem reflects that side of the skeptical tradition that deals with communal concerns like war, as well as the more introverted side that uses Christmas as a means to consider the condition of one's own self in a world whose oppression is normally taken for granted...

...Et nobis Puer natus est...

...In this strain Christmas occasions regret, nostalgia, despair and their kin, or else just occurs, is played upon as a kind of counterpoint to the poet's (often melancholic) state...

...Robinson addresses "A Christmas Sonnet" to "one in doubt," reclaiming for the twentieth century at least a trace of what man received millennia ago: Something is here that was not here before, And strangely has not yet been crucified...

...and it may be they demoralize us more because of what Christmas had once caused men to expect...

...Dunbar's "Of the Nativity of Christ," written about 1500, marks as well as any poem the flowering of this tradition: Star, planet, firmament, and sphere, Fire, earth, air, and water clear, To give him loving, most and least, That comes in to so meek manner...

...As strong as the joyful wonder in much of this Christmas poetry is the sense of evil at work in the world and challenged by the Christ child...

...Ironically the latter's "Christ Climbed Down," as Christian in its way as the story of Christ's chastising the money-changers, has caused part Commonweal: 261 of the recent textbook controversies in American schools because it predicts Christ's re-entry, into "some anonymous Mary's womb" for "the very craziest/of Second Comings...

...Iran has already indicated a purchase of 250, and 800 are projected for Western European countries...

...And it could force poets to perform miracles...

...In our world it's probably worth recalling that what one's words do can offer us a source of miracle...

...Many of these poems--a good number of them set as carols, that type of song whose religious use some trace to the second century A.D.-draw Christmas near for their listeners by localizing scenic or dramatic detail...

...You are the baby in the barn...

...We enter with him and others our eternally postwar modern age...

...The skeptical tradition of Christmas poetry, ranging from intimations of futility to outright nihilism, suggests that the event of Christ's birth has lost (perhaps never had) its effect on man's personal and communal histories...

...he laments, longing to follow someone to "the lonely barton by yonder coomb/Our childhood used to know," where he hopes to see the oxen kneel...

...by A. Flores in Modern European Poetry...

...Chiefs replace Magi in the song, bringing "gifts of fox and beaver pelt" (trans...

...The poet speaks to h/s wife ("the taste of tears is in her mouth") and to Christ's mother, revealing that Christmas may have been betrayed by the world, but must be kept alive in it...

...In Europe folk traditions, through which so many carols descended, had long before started to wane...

...A "melancholy house(s) _9 . . dies unnoticed" while the other houses "comb their roofs," and "the moon will not appear/nor will the street-lamp cradle the drunkard" (trans...

...The U.S...

...give the child a lamb, a redwing, and milk (translated in A Christmas Book, E. Sayre, ed., New York: Potter, 1966...

...Later, after the Great War and Irish civil strife, Yeats is less hopeful...

...Donne writes of Christ as "Immensitie" who makes himself "Weake enough, now into our world to come" ("Nativitie...

...trans...

...For He is a kingdom in the hearts of men...

...Christmas is, after all, John tells us, a form of poetry, the Word's coming to life...

...Southwell poses {he riddle: "Patrem Parit Filia...

...and an age of machine followed hard upon it...

...Their faith, their conception of the universe, their sense of decorum--all contributed no doubt to the way Christmas allowed such poets to rise above the social matrix of their time and celebrate the Nativity's general balm...

...Christmas, so insistent on the simplicity of its origins, suffered in a world growing more complex...

...E.A...

...It's clear that few poets today agree on what Christmas means...

...Browning's "Christmas Eve" loses that day's symbolic import in a lengthy dream-treatise on comparative religions that is sometimes playful, sometimes tedious...

...Poets as diverse as Millay and Ferlinghetti have scored that commercialism...

...While William Stafford remembers the "Christmas Mother made paper/presents . . . and (we hung up tumbleweed for a tree" as part of "The Rescued Year," an evocation of childhood that calms him until "in the quiet I hold no need, no hurry...

...Further over on this side, there is Allen Tate turning from a strangely nourishing silence ("knowing a nightmare has no sound") in 1934 ("Sonnets at Christmas") to a hopeless involuted vision of a "mummy Christ" on a day that's a "decapitate joke" ("More Sonnets at Christmas," 1942...

...By it we gauge our losses...

...but recalling how "Dark was that first Christmas Day," he implies, though faintly, hope again in the figure of the ox ("Two Christmas Cards...

...Lamb of the shepherds, child, how still you lie...

...Poets of the celebratory tradition, some prey to dog20 December 1974:260 gerel at times, have nevertheless managed to produce a canon of genuinely good Christmas poetry...

...Several of them, as we have seen, imply a lingering faith in the power of the first Christmas that, however, is just about extinguished...

...So hallow'd and so gracious is the time...

...Hardy, likewise, recalls in ~'The Oxen" an old legend of the animals kneeling before Christ, related to him by an "elder" one Christmas Eve...

...and he solves his dilemma, in a sense, by outgrowing the accretions of past Christmases...

...is proposing the winning selection in competition between General Dynamic's single-engine YF-16 jet fighter, and Northrop's twin-engine YF-17, nicknamed the Cobra...

...Throughout their visit in this country the members of the consortium were given the red carpet treatment with all of the trimmings...

...Air Force...

...And there is Gerardo Diego's "Christmas Eve," his portrait of a world seen in surrealistic animation, an emblem of the speaker's inability to believe...

...Several of the quotes above suggest this and show how the birth transforms a flawed world...

...William Austin and others have Chanticleer singing long before dawn to herald Christ's appearance, a legend Shakespeare alludes to in the first scene of Hamlet, where Marcellus invokes the wholesome season of "our Saviour's birth": No fairy takes, nor witch has power to charm...

...in them a miraculous "infant landscape" takes shape and refreshes the poet...

...Milton hymns the beginning of man's redemption, an end to the "old Dragon's" sway...

...All he has is a wish: _ 9 that their sleep be sound I say this childermas* Who could not, at one time Have saved them from the gas...

...Longfellow translates a Neapolitan carol that shows the earth turning to paradise at Christmas...

...Yet no part but what will Be Christ our Saviour still...

...Neither, though, can indulge it entirely...

...east o/.Holy Innocents, Dec...

...World War 11 had made such hope in the Christmas promise of good will and peace more difficult than ever to summon...

...The ashes in William Carlos Williams' "Burning the Christmas Greens" signal not the loss of Christmas but another world that its passage creates...

...He cannot match for his children those TV heroes who "make the world behave...

...CHRISTMAS IN POETRY JOHN DRUSKA (Continued from tront cover) mas poetry and its immediate, heirs, when not recalling us to the folk heritage of mid-winter feasting that Christians adapted as their own (see the first part of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight for one such revel), tend to revive and hallow the event of Christ's birth and all actions that attend it...

...and Coleridge comes up with just a line in "The Holy Mother" that even suggests the attractive naivet~ of medieval lyrics: "The milk rushed faster to her breast...

...by L. Lawner in Modern European Poetry, New York: Bantam, 1966) Perhaps Anthony Hecht's grim humor is all we have left for solace...

...over this sale...

...by R. Sawyer in Welcome Christmas.t, New York: Viking, 1955...

...Modern times have brought to us not just Christmas under a changed aspect, but Christmas forcibly altered, hemmed by massive commercialism, World Wars, mundane alienation...

...As an added I DOUGLAS MATTERN, a long-time peace activist, is chairman of the World Citizens League...

...O hold him tenderly, dear Mother...

...After the seventeenth century, though, Christmas poetry, at least in the English language, loses a good deal of its religious vigor and the feast seems to attract fewer genuine celebrants...

...It may be that Christmas is in poetry because we can't do without it and neither can poetry...

...His articles have appeared in Challenge, Catholic World and other magazines...

...The reckoning that Christmas forces on the modern poet, what it makes him admit of his world, has undercut the celebratory tradition of earlier times, but it has also helped infuse the twentieth century with Christmas poetry of several kinds, making our own age as important in its handling of Christmas themes as the more orthodox medieval centuries and the Metaphysical period...

...War, of course, isn't unique to our century...

...Before such wonders awe and rejoicing are in order, on earth's part as well as its creatures...

...language, God the Father appears as "Gitchi Manitou" sendifig choirs of angels to sing over his Son, who is wrapped in a "ragged robe of rabbit skin...

...When poets like Pope, Coleridge and Browning write about Christmas it's evident the occasion isn't all that much a source of inspiration to their poetry...

...There are the curiously sympathetic allusions to the child amid the harsh, apparently anti-religious sentiment of Sylvia Plath's "Nick and the Candlestick" and "Mary's Song...

...and Christopher Smart hails the Nativity's "magnitude of meekness" ("The Nativity of Our Lord...

...Other poets, by virtue of their personal visions, appear more certain of the feast's etficacy...

...For the celebratory poets, as long as Christ has moved earth and men and can keep doing so through their poems, there is reason to hope and have faith, even for someone like Vaughan, "all filth and obscene" (Christ's Nativity...

...Air Force...

...The four-nation consortium also visited France and Sweden, the major competitors with the U.S...

...Pope cranks out sub-par couplets in "The Messiah", in which the Saviour "on the sightless eye-ball (shall) pour the day...

...While these two poems hearken to traditional Christmas celebrations, Clare's reduction of hope to his own words and Hardy's nostalgia are in fact dements of what has come to be another tradition in Christmas poetry, the skeptical...

...Longfellow, for one, had briefly anticipated Christmas' role in our world in "Christmas Bells...

...As he regards Christmas the modern poet may find it still necessary to speak of the child as a locus of men's hopes and fears, a miraculous source of poetry in a prosaic world...

...A sixteenth-century cradle song, for example, varies the words of a French nurse's lullaby to include its speaker and audience in homage to the Christ child: The knees of my heart sall I bow And sing that right Balulalow...