All the king's men

And here's how Shakespeare celebrated Epiphany.  Twelfth Night (or What you Will) was written to mark the twelfth night of Christmas, and the end of Christmastide. The first recorded performance was 1602, just three months before the death of Queen Elizabeth.  The play itself doesn't have much to say about the incarnation, but plenty about love, revelry and cross-dressing mayhem. Feste the clown is one of Shakespeare's most memorable characters, and his wit and music have a melancholy streak that colours the whole play. Here's what he sings when Sir Toby Belch and the ridiculous Andrew Aguecheek beg him for a love song - not exactly what they were after.

O mistress mine, where are you roaming?
O stay and hear, your true love's coming,
That can sing both high and low.

Trip no further, pretty sweeting,
Journeys end in lovers meeting,
Every wise man's son doth know.

What is love? 'Tis not hereafter,
Present mirth hath present laughter.
What's to come is still unsure.

In delay there lies no plenty,
Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty.
Youth's a stuff will not endure.

Of all kings king

Today is Epiphany. Not being Anglican, Catholic, Orthodox or any other 'high' church goer (my tradition is the lowest of the low) I have never observed this particular feast, or indeed any other feast - and certainly not lent. But having grown up without them, I now find them intriguing occasions for reflection. Without having observance forced on me, I can enjoy them as novelties, fresh and strange, as a calendar that curiously overlaps my usual one without imposing on it. What I like best about them is the opportunity they afford poets to produce variations on a theme, improvisations on very familiar tunes.  Since my 12 Lays included only one woman poet, I thought I'd make up the deficiency with the eminently 'high' Christina Rossetti. Here's her poem "Epiphany."

‘Lord Babe, if Thou art He
We sought for patiently,
Where is Thy court?
Hither may prophecy and star resort;
Men heed not their report.' –
'Bow down and worship, righteous man:
This Infant of a span
Is He man sought for since the world began!' –
'Then, Lord, accept my gold, too base a thing
For Thee, of all kings King.' –

'Lord Babe, despite Thy youth
I hold Thee of a truth
Both Good and Great:
But wherefore dost
Thou keep so mean a state,
Low-lying desolate?' –
'Bow down and worship, righteous seer:
The Lord our God is here
Approachable, Who bids us all draw near.' –
'Wherefore to Thee I offer frankincense,
Thou Sole Omnipotence.' –

'But I have only brought
Myrrh; no wise afterthought
Instructed me
To gather pearls or gems, or choice to see
Coral or ivory.' –
'Not least thine offering proves thee wise:
For myrrh means sacrifice,
And He that lives, this Same is He that dies.' –
'Then here is myrrh: alas, yea woe is me
That myrrh befitteth Thee.' -

Myrrh, frankincense, and gold:
And lo from wintry fold
Good-will doth bring
A Lamb, the innocent likeness of this King
Whom stars and seraphs sing:
And lo the bird of love, a Dove,
Flutters and coos above:
And Dove and Lamb and Babe agree in love: –
Come all mankind, come all creation hither,
Come, worship Christ together.

Star-led wizards

Have I saved the best for last? Depends how much you like Milton I suppose. I like his poem “On the Morning of Christ's Nativity” chiefly because it is so far a cry from plastic gyrating Santas and erratic lurid lights entwined about inane scenes of snowy European twee. Milton's heavenly muse is at work here, as in Paradise Lost, to lend grandeur, gravitas, mystery, and even fantasy to the familiar story. Instead of a humble, homely tale, the nativity here is a matter of thrones, dominations, princedoms, virtues, powers. The stage is cosmic, the event cataclysmic. The characters are kings and their squadrons, wizards and ancient sages. The birth of Christ is a sacred and solemn compact among the hosts of heaven. It's only four stanzas, but it feels like an epic.

This is the month, and this the happy morn
Wherein the Son of Heav'n's eternal King,
Of wedded Maid, and Virgin Mother born,
Our great redemption from above did bring;
For so the holy sages once did sing,
That he our deadly forfeit should release,
And with his Father work us a perpetual peace.

That glorious Form, that Light unsufferable,
And that far-beaming blaze of Majesty,
Wherewith he wont at Heav'n's high council-table,
To sit the midst of Trinal Unity,
He laid aside, and here with us to be,
Forsook the courts of everlasting day,
And chose with us a darksome house of mortal clay.

Say Heav'nly Muse, shall not thy sacred vein
Afford a present to the Infant God?
Hast thou no verse, no hymn, or solemn strain,
To welcome him to this his new abode,
Now while the heav'n, by the Sun's team untrod,
Hath took no print of the approaching light,
And all the spangled host keep watch in squadrons bright?

See how from far upon the eastern road
The star-led wizards haste with odours sweet:
O run, prevent them with thy humble ode,
And lay it lowly at his blessed feet;
Have thou the honour first thy Lord to greet,
And join thy voice unto the angel quire,
From out his secret altar touched with hallowed fire.

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!