Amid dark wings of storm

Laurence Housman (1865-1959), younger brother of AE, was a prolific playwright and illustrator who made beautiful art nouveau illlustrations for writers like Christina Rossetti and George Meredith. He also wrote a somewhat scandalous nativity play - apparently depicting biblical characters on the stage was one of the Victorians' many, many taboos - and this lovely poem for the Feast of the Nativity: “A Disputation between Christ and the human form.” It's a little bit Herberty, and a little bit more like one of Andrew Marvell's dialogues between Body and Soul, but I like it mostly because of the very unusual meter and rhyme scheme.

If I'm right, the scheme looks something like this:

ABAABB
ABAABB
ABBABAA
ABAABB
ABBBBAABA
ABCACCAC
ABBAABACC
ABAACC
AABBCBBCC

I can't see a pattern, but then I don't have the sort of brain that finds patterns easily. My only thought about how it works is a vague one about poetic form itself as a metaphor for the incarnation: the incarnation of Christ fills, exceeds and even plays jazz riffs on the human form - stretching its possibilities, sounding notes it never knew it possessed. Also, the sixth stanza contains the only unrhymed line ending - 'Christ'. Perhaps a discord suggesting that although Christ comes in peace, he and the world do not, cannot, rhyme. 

Comest Thou peaceably, O Lord?
‘Yea, I am Peace!
Be not so fearful to afford
Thy Maker room! for I am the Reward
To which all generations of increase
Looking did never cease.

‘Down from amid dark wings of storm
I set My Feet
To earth. Will not My earth grow warm
To feel her Maker take the form
He made, when now, Creation’s purpose meet,
Man’s body is to be God’s Mercy-seat?’

Lord, I am foul: there is no whole
Fair part in me
Where Thou canst deign to be!
This form is not Thy making, since it stole
Fruit from the bitter Tree.
‘Yet still thou hast the griefs to give in toll
That I may test the sickness of man’s soul.’

O Lord, my work is without worth!
I am afraid,
Lest I should man the blissful Birth.
Quoth Christ, ‘Ere seas had shores, or earth
Foundations laid,
My Cross was made!’

‘Naught canst thou do that was not willed
By Love to be,
To bring the Work to pass through Me. No knee
Stiffens, or bends before My Sov’reignty,
But from the world’s beginning hath fulfilled
Its choice betwixt the valleyed and the hilled.
For both, at one decree,
My Blood was spilled.’

Yet canst Thou use these sin-stained hands?
‘These hands,’ quoth Christ,
‘Of them I make My need:
Since they sufficed to forge the bands
Wherein I hunger, they shall sow the seed!
And with bread daily they shall feed
My Flesh till, bought and bound, It stands
A Sacrifice to bleed.’

Lord, let this house be swept and garnished first!
For fear lest sin
Do there look in,
Let me shut fast the windows: lest Thou thirst,
Make some pure inner well of waters burst:
For no sweet water can man’s delving win—
Earth is so curst.
Also bar up the door: Thou wilt do well
To dwell, whilst with us, anchorite in Thy cell.

Christ said ‘Let be: leave wide
All ports to grief!
Here when I knock I will not be denied
The common lot of all that here abide;
Were I so blinded, I were blind in chief:
How should I see to bring the blind relief?

Wilt Thou so make Thy dwelling? Then I fear
Man, after this, shall dread to enter here:
For all the inner courts will be so bright,
He shall be dazzled with excess of light,
And turn, and flee!
‘But from his birth I will array him right,
And lay the temple open for his sight,
And say to help him, as I bid him see:
“This is for thee!”’

A summer miracle

The beautifully named John Greenleaf Whittier was a Quaker poet and abolitionist in nineteenth-century Massachussetts. Here's his poem "Christmas in 1888."

Low in the east, against a white, cold dawn,
The black-lined silhouette of the woods was drawn,
And on a wintry waste
Of frosted streams and hillsides bare and brown,
Through thin cloud-films a pallid ghost looked down,
The waning moon half-faced.

In that pale sky and sere, snow-waiting earth,
What sign was there of the immortal birth?
What herald of the One?
Lo! swift as thought the heavenly radiance came,
A rose-red splendor swept the sky like flame,
Up rolled the round, bright sun!

And all was changed.
From a transfigured world
The moon's ghost fled, the smoke of home-hearths curled
Up to the still air unblown.
In Orient warmth and brightness, did that morn
O'er Nain and Nazereth, when the Christ was born,
Break fairer than our own?

The morning's promise noon and eve fulfilled
In warm, soft sky and landscape hazy-filled
And sunset fair as they;
A sweet reminder of His holiest time,
A summer-miracle in our winter clime,
God gave a perfect day.

The near was blended with the old and far,
And Bethlehem's hillside and the Magi's star
Seemed here, as there and then,
Our homestead pine-tree was the Syrian palm,
Our heart's desire the angels' midnight psalm,
Peace, and good-will to men!

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.

Hardy New Year

A slight departure from the nativity, but I think if you want to you can hear its echo in this, one of Thomas Hardy's most famous poems, “The Darkling Thrush,” which he composed as the year 1900 drew to a close.

I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter's dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.

The land's sharp features seemed to be
The Century's corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.

Murray Christmas

I didn't really like this Les Murray poem “Animal Nativity” the first time I read it, but a second reading improved my opinion and a third still more. So if you don't like it, don't run away immediately - try, try again.

The Iliad of peace began
when this girl agreed.
Now goats in trees, fish in the valley
suddenly feel vivid.

Swallows flit in the stable as if
a hatching of their kind,
turned human, cried in the manger
showing the hunger-diamond.

Cattle are content that this calf
must come in human form.
Spiders discern a water-walker.
Even humans will sense the lamb,

He who frees from the old poem
turtle-dove and snake,
who gets death forgiven
who puts the apple back.

Dogs, less enslaved but as starving
as the poorest human there,
crouch, agog at a crux of presence
remembered as a star.