Yeats and Maud Gonne

 The poetry of William Butler Yeats spans fifty years. During that course of time, Yeats evolved stylistically and thematically. His early poems often reflect his interest in Irish myth, legends and tales. His later poems shift toward politics, the contrast between youth and age, the Irish fight for independence and civil war and his personal mythology regarding human history. The single most repeated presence in Yeats’s poetry is Maud Gonne, his unrequited love. In every collection of his poetry except one, is at least one poem alluding to or metaphorically suggesting Maud Gonne. Yeats met Gonne in January 1889, and soon after fell hopelessly in love with her. She was born in 1866 and became an Irish patriot, an actress and a feminist. She was a political activist, one of the founders of Sinn Fein and was fervent in her work for Irish independence from Britain in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She also was a successful actress and the heroine in Yeats’s first play, Cathleen ni Houlihan. In 1891, Yeats, asked her to marry him, but she refused. Undeterred, he asked her four more times, but each time she said they could only be friends. To his horror, Gonne married Major John MacBride in 1903, and though a “drunken vainglorious lout,” MacBride was one of the heroes of the Easter 1916 uprising, executed after the revolt failed. He was an abusive husband, and he and Gonne separated in 1905. Her separation from MacBride gave Yeats hope that Maud might finally love him as he loved her. That was never to be, but all was not lost since his heartache fermented much of his verse he was to compose. Here is an early poem, written shortly after Gonne first refused to marry Yeats; it subtly alludes to her in the second stanza.

                   The Sorrow of Love

The brawling of a sparrow in the eaves,
The brilliant moon and all the milky sky,
And all that famous harmony of leaves,
Had blotted out man's image and his cry.

A girl arose that had red mournful lips                          5
And seemed the greatness of the world in tears,
Doomed like Odysseus and the laboring ships
And proud as Priam murdered with his peers;

Arose, and on the instant clamorous eaves,
A climbing moon upon an empty sky,                            10
And all that lamentation of the leaves,
Could but compose man's image and his cry.     
                                                                                       (1892)

In the first stanza, it becomes clear that something regarding nature is amiss. The image of “brawling of a sparrow” clashes with the middle lines that paint attractive images of a “milky sky,” a “Brilliant moon,” and a “harmony of leaves.” Then, the last line bluntly states that all of these images “had “blotted out man’s image and his cry." In the nineteenth-century poets, such as Wordsworth, had proclaimed that nature could engender a “sense sublime / Of something far more interfused.” Nature had offered boundless possibilities for joy and artistic creation, especially for poets. In this case, nature has become antagonistic, erasing man’s identity and his speech. Is Yeats suggesting that nature can no longer offer inspiration or is he projecting his own dejection onto nature?

The second stanza shifts to a different subject. Suddenly, “A girl arose that had red mournful lips,” followed by the enigmatic line “And seemed the greatness of the world in tears.” Who is the girl and why is she denoted as “the greatness of the world in tears”? The simile that closes the stanza reveals her identity; she is obviously Helen of Troy, the “girl” who bewitched Paris and sparked the two great poems of Homer. Scholars of Yeats (and Yeats himself) have frequently pointed out that Yeats identified Maud Gonne with Helen of Troy. As you read Yeats’s poems, you will discover time and again this symbol (Helen) that he would most often employ to represent his unfulfilled passion for Maud Gonne.

Stanza 3 picks up the thread began in the previous stanza with the verb “Arose,” but then reproduces the imagery in stanza 1, only this time, “A girl” presides over those images and “rewrites” them in a way that reflects Yeats’s despair. The moon ascends an “empty sky,” and the leaves’ “lamentation leave no doubt that the presence of Helen now dominates and even supersedes nature as a force impelling Yeats’s imagination. For Yeats, Maud Gonne will always be his muse.

Spring Poems

 Geoffery Chaucer, in his opening lines of The Canterbury Tales, suggests that each April brings a promise of rebirth and renewal. Relieved and grateful that the life-engendering power of spring has returned after the dark, cold winter days, his pilgrims happily set off on a journey to offer prayers of thanks to the saint of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, for protecting their health through the bleak period of winter.

When April with its sweet-smelling showers
Has pierced the drought of March to the root,
And bathed every vein (of the plants) in such liquid
By which power the flower is created;
When the West Wind also with its sweet breath,
In every wood and field has breathed life into
The tender new leaves, and the young sun
Has run half its course in Aries,
And small fowls make melody,
Those that sleep all the night with open eyes
So Nature incites them in their hearts,
Then folk long to go on pilgrimages...
Harvard's Chaucer Website

Poems celebrating the return of spring after the desolation of winter is a well-worn tradition in poetry. But spring has not always elicited relief or joy in poets. Later poets have explored how spring arouses regret, dismay, sorrow or even despondency. Wordsworth’s spring poem, “Lines Written in Early Spring,” (1798) commences with a musical serenity but quickly descends into a mournful mood.

         Lines Written in Early Spring

I heard a thousand blended notes,
While in a grove I sate reclined,
In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts
Bring sad thoughts to the mind.

To her fair works did Nature link
The human soul that through me ran;
And much it grieved my heart to think
What man had man made of man.

Through primrose tufts, in that green bower,
the periwinkle trailed its wreaths;
And 'tis my faith that every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes.

The birds around me hopped and played,
Their thoughts I cannot measure--
But the least motion which they made
It seemed a thrill of pleasure.

The budding twigs spread out their fan,
To catch the breezy air;
And I must think, do all I can,
That there was pleasure there.

If this belief from heaven be sent,
If such be Nature's holy plan,
Have I not reason to lament
What man has made of man?

Reclining in a grove, the speaker hears "a thousand blended notes”—nature’s music and feels a “sweet mood” come over him. Nevertheless, that “sweet mood” is one in which “pleasure thoughts / Bring sad thoughts to the mind.” Why do “pleasant thoughts” make him think of “sad thoughts”? In stanza 2, Wordsworth implies what had made him sad. He believed that human beings and nature are essentially interconnected: “To her fair works did Nature link / The human soul that through me ran.” Moreover, he was convinced that sharing in the “fair works” of nature should induce human beings to appreciate not only the sublime beauty of the physical world but also elevate their minds and spirits, making them kind, gentle, charitable, and noble. Instead, the world around him had been undergoing turbulent economic changes. The Industrial Revolution had given birth to sprawling manufacturing towns that forced swaths of the population from small villages to work in “dark satanic mills” as characterized by the fellow poet Willaim Blake. In addition, the enclosure of open-field farms by privately owned large agricultural interests displaced hundreds from small farms and drove many into poverty. Wordsworth saw cruelty and greed of these economic policies as directly contradicting the true relationship humans were supposed to have with nature. Nature inspires Wordsworth with joy, but the behavior of men blighted the potential joy of spring: “And much it grieved my heart to think / What man has made of man.”

Through the next three stanzas of the poem, Wordsworth continues to embrace nature but the feeling in stanza 1 haunts him. In stanza 3, he states ‘‘tis my faith that flowers enjoy flower / Enjoys the air it breathes.” But in stanza (4), that “faith” or certainty recedes slightly as he admits that he cannot know what the birds think, but he wants (“seemed”) to believe their movement denotes “a thrill of pleasure.” In stanza 5, he watches the leaves emerge from their winter sleep and “catch the breezy air.” The “pleasure” he should experience spontaneously from this seasonal gift of nature has to be compelled by his mind into thoughts: “think, do all I can, / That there was pleasure there.” The exertion here is as much emotional as it is intellectual. As the poem concludes, Wordsworth constructs a logical proposition in the form of a question. If the beauty and glory of nature is a gift or “holy plan,” what else can he do but “lament / What man has made of man?”

Perhaps the most despondent utterance about the arrival of spring comes from T. S. Eliot’s famous opening lines of The Waste Land. (1922)

April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

It should be clear that these lines echo Chaucer’s from The Canterbury Tales. When first encountering the poem, many readers are bewildered by them. However, considering them after reading Wordsworth’s “What man has made of man,” their meaning and power can be more easily grasped. Eliot wrote his poem in the aftermath of the enormous death and destruction of the First World War. The shock of the war filled Eliot with a genuine dread, and a fear that life had become morally and spiritually sterile. For him, humans were trapped in a nightmare of existential alienation. How could spring with its “promise” of resurrection be sustained for Eliot in this modern world that “man had made”? Eliot meanders among the consciousness of the dead souls in his poem, through that waste land, and if you read his poem, you will be surprised what he, and ultimately you, discover.    

Saint Patrick's Day Poem

During the Easter week of 1916 Irish rebels took over the General Post Office in Dublin and battled British forces for control of the city. The Irish surrender and the British government executed several leaders of the revolt. William Butler Yeats, who believed strongly that violence was the wrong way to shake off English rule, nevertheless commemorated those who led the Irish and were executed in his poem Easter 1916:

           Easter 1916

I have met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter of desk among gray
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

That woman's days were spent
In ignorant good will
Her nights in argument
Until her voice grew shrill.
What voice more sweet than hers
When, young and beautiful,
She rode to harriers?
This man had kept a school
And rode our winged horse;
This other his helper and friend
Was coming into his force;
He might have won fame in the end,
So sensitive his nature seemed,
So daring and sweet his thought.
This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vainglorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too has been changed in hi turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
the horse that comes from the road,
the rider, the birds that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud,
Minute by minute they change;
A shadow of cloud on the stream
changes minute by minute;
A horse plashes within it;
The long-legged moorhens  dive,
And hens to moorcocks call;
Minute by minute they live:
The stone's in the midst of it all.

Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven's part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
On limbs that had run wild.
What was it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse--
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

Yeats begins by thinking of times he had encountered a few of the rebel leaders in the course of everyday life. What unfolds is a mini narrative of previous encounters with those who fought that Easter week. He had “met them at close of day,” acknowledged them as they “passed,” exchanged “polite meaningless words,” and essentially felt that they and he “But lived where motley is worn.” These men and women seemed to him plain, insignificant human beings. But something has changed, and the stanza closes with the refrain that proclaims, “All changed, changed utterly: / A terrible beauty is born.”

Stanza 2 drops us abruptly among “characters” who obviously fought against the British. Each seems quite ordinary and certainly far from heroic. Yeats withholds their names: “That” woman who apparently argue for the Irish cause “Until her voice grew shrill”; two other men, one who “had kept a school,” and the other who possessed a “sensitive…nature”; finally, “A drunken, vainglorious lout.” All of them have performed in what Yeats terms “the casual comedy;” but as in stanza 1, the poem’s refrain tells us the revolt was certainly no comedy, and that these rebels are “Transformed utterly” by what they did and again that within Ireland “A terrible beauty is born.”

Something quite unexpected and unusual happens in stanza 3. He contrasts devotion to a single purpose to the “living stream” of time and change. The unnamed persons above become “Hearts with one purpose alone / Through summer and winter seem / Enchanted to a stone.” The rebel’s single-minded resort to violence disturbed Yeats. He supported the Irish goal of self- determination but recoiled from the violence that the rebels used to achieve that end. How could he resolve these conflicting points of view?

In the final stanza, Yeats moves back and forth within his ambivalence regarding the violent methods of the rebels. He asks first whether “Too long a sacrifice / Can make a stone of the heart?” Fighting against the stronger, dominant English seemed to harden hearts and cause senseless deaths. His judgment of the rebels quickly falls back as he decides to leave judgment to “heaven’s part.” He muses that the rebels are akin to children to be named by the poet the way “a mother names her child / When sleep at last has come / On limbs that had run wild.” This fantasy fades when he asks and answers, “Was is it but nightfall? / No, no, not night but death.” He realizes that the rebels are more than simply zealous, unbending ideologues; they were “Bewildered” by “excess of love” and were patriots who fought and died for their freedom. The ambivalence he expressed earlier in the poem gives way to his view that they are the agents of the terrible beauty [that] is born.” He pronounces the names he left unsaid before in a roster of heroes to be honored forever:

I write it out in a verse--
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

Why Read Paradise Lost?

 John Milton’s Paradise Lost is often recognized as the greatest poem in the English Language. The poem is a powerful masterpiece that Milton hoped would “find” a “fit audience…though few.” (VII, 31) Although it never had a broad, popular “audience,” today, the poem is less read than it should be, which is attributable to less apt or oblivious reading public.

Paradise Lost is the story of the Fall of Adam and Eve, but unlike the biblical version in Genesis, 3:1-5 which takes a few minutes to read, Milton’s epic spans ten-thousand lines. Adam and Eve are meant to be the poem’s central subject, but Satan, the luminous Lucifer who was once God’s favorite, is the character who inspires awe in the reader. Milton did not intend for him to be the hero or antihero of the poem, yet the English Romantic poets William Blake, Lord Byron, and Percy Shelley certainly saw him as such. Blake thought him to be the poem’s hero in Satan’s bold assertions, and Lord Byron was drawn to Satan’s rebellious spirit—“better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.” In his Defense of Poetry, Shelley observed that “Nothing can exceed the energy and magnificence of the character of Satan as expressed in Paradise Lost.”

In the opening lines, Milton tells us why he composed Paradise Lost

Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater man                          
Restore us, and regain the blissful seat. (I, 1-5)

This initial passage proclaims Milton’s profound ambition, which was to “assert eternal providence / And justify the ways of God to man,” (I, 26) makes us think that the poem will begin in the Garden of Eden. Milton has something else in mind and it will be three books before we will meet the “grandparents” of humanity. First, we are introduced to Satan, who dominates the narrative of Books I and II. After rebelling against God’s rule in heaven (told in later books) and being utterly defeated, Satan lies “vanquished” (I, 52) in “floods and whirlwinds of tempestuous fire.” (I, 77)

He sees his fellow fallen angel, now a devil, Beelzebub, and tells him he neither regrets his rebellion nor laments the horrific suffering he has brought upon himself and the one-third of heaven, the angels who joined his ranks. “Yet not for those, / Nor what the potent victor in his rage / Can inflict, do I repent or change.” (I, 96) A little later in this first speech come words that inspired the Romantic poets and, frankly, so many other readers of this great poem. No force, no matter how powerful, can undermine Satan’s resolve to continue fighting against the “oppressive” foe who has demanded his subservience. In valiant words he exclaims,

                          ...What though the field be lost?
All is not lost; the unconquerable will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield:
And what else not to be overcome?
That glory never shall his wrath or might
Extort from me. To bow and sue for grace
With suppliant knee, and deify his power... (I, 105-112)

Traditional Christian teaching and literature does not prepare readers for this depiction of Satan. Rather than a prince of evil or darkness, he seems to have been waging a legitimate revolt against a “…grand foe, / Who now triumphs, and in th’ excess of joy / Sole reigning holds the tyranny of Heav’n.” (I, 122-124) Is God simply a tyrant and Satan an angelic freedom fighter? Satan’s third speech contains lines readers most often quoted to argue Satan is a heroic rebel. He claims Hell as is own and asserts his profound psychological freedom:

Receive thy new possessor: one who brings
A mind not to be changed by place or time.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n. (I, 252-255)

This is certainly not the singular description we have of the serpent who deceives Eve in Genesis. Here is a character who is not only undaunted by this tormenting prison but who also believes he can undo control of its effect within his mind. He continues:

Here we may reign secure, and in my choice
To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav'n. (I, 261-263)

To make the most of this “horrible destruction” (I, 137) within the imagination is impressive. To transform it to a kingdom over which he can reign is an astonishing act of indomitable dignity. Beelzebub, who already praised Satan, (I, 128-133) responds to this speech by reminding Satan that if he calls to his troops of fallen angels and they will be roused from their stunned condition and “they will soon resume / New courage and revive, though now they lie / Groveling and prostate on yon lake of fire.” (I, 277-280) In the rest of Book I, Satan “comforts” his fallen comrades “with hope yet of regaining Heaven” and tells them lastly of the rumor of a new world and new kind of creature to be created. The devils construct Satan’s Palace, Pandaemonium and the next section of the poem begins in Book II.

As Book II opens, the narrator presents Satan as a royal king whose resilience inspires the fallen angels and the reader:

High on a throne of royal state, which far
Outshone the wealth of Ormus and of Ind,
Or where the gorgeous East with richest hand
Show'rs on her kings barbaric peal and gold,
Satan exalted sat, by merit raised
To that bad eminence, and from despair
thus high uplifted beyond hope, aspires
Beyond thus high, insatiate to pursue
Vain war with Heav'n, and by success untaught
His proud imaginations thus displayed.  II, (1-10)

From his throne, Satan addresses his army, assuring their defeat and banishment to Hell cannot destroy them.

"Powers and Dominions, deities of Heav'n,
For since no deep within her gulf can hold
Immortal vigor, though oppressed and fall'n,
I give not Heav’n for lost. From this descent
Celestial Virtues rising, will appear
More glorious and more dread that from no fall,
And trust themselves to fear no second fate." (II, 11-17) 

His unflagging confidence energizes his army, and he proposes they debate the best way to attack Heav’n and God once more: …“and by what way, / Whether of open war or covert guile, / We now debate: who can advise, may speak.” II, 40-43 A series of speeches follow with one devil calling for “open war,” (II, 51) another for accepting their defeat, and a third suggesting they mine the mineral riches in Hell. Beelzebub steps in and argues that they should send someone in “search of this new world” (of Adam and Eve) created by God and somehow “Seduce them to our party, that their God / May prove their foe, and with repenting hand / Abolish his own work.” (II, 368-370) The devils unanimously agree and Satan volunteers to find the new creation and explore how they might be “Seduced” to the devils “party.” He flies through space, encounters two extraordinary creatures, directed by Chaos toward Eden which he reaches in Book IV.

In Book III, Milton introduces the character of God, whom readers have found rather unappealing. He looks down from heaven, sees Satan flying toward the Garden of Eden with the aim of corrupting Adam and Eve and tells his Son how Satan will succeed:

                                                            ...And now
Through all restraint broke loose he wings his way
Not far off Heav'n, in the precincts of light,
Directly towards the new-created world,
And man there placed, with purposed to assay
If him by force he can destroy, or worse,
By some false guile pervert; and shall pervert;
For man will hearken to glozing lies,
And easily transgress the sole command,
Sole pledge of his obedience: so will fall
He and his faithless progeny: whose fault?
Whose but his own? Ingrate, he had of me
All he could have; I made him just and right
Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall. (III, 86-99)

Why does God argue he is not responsible for protecting Adam and Eve from this powerful adversary? Why does he lecture that he created them free to withstand Satan’s temptation and gave them the freedom to sin. Although free will makes them “Sufficient” and “free,” he created them, and he is omniscient, omnipotence, foresees what is going to happen and could as easily prevent the suffering and death that would cascade through the generations after Adam and Eve transgress as he did Satan’s attempt to overthrow his rule. Did Milton notice that his character comes across as arbitrary, argumentative and unforgivably callous when God tells his son that he has “immutable foreseen” (III, 121) that Adam and Eve would be deceived by Satan? The full speech can be read here. (III, 80-134)

Book IV takes us back to Satan as he approaches earth. The narrator describes Satan as “bold” (IV, 13) and “fearless” (IV, 14) and defines his psychological torment he cannot escape: “The Hell within him, for within him Hell / He brings…” (IV, 20-21) Shortly afterwards, in one of the most interesting scenes in the poem, Satan evokes the reader’s pity as he poignantly laments his crime and reveals his guilt. But first, his pride and anger erupt, and he denounces the sun for its shining brilliance, since it reminds him of former brightness when he was the luminous Lucifer:

O thou that with surpassing glory crowned,
Look'st from thy dominion like the God
Of this new world; at whose sight all the stars
Hide their diminished heads; to thee I call,
But with no friendly voice and add thy name
O Sun, to tell thee I hate thy beams
That bring to my remembrance from what state
I fell, how glorious once above thy sphere;
Till pride and worse ambition threw me down
Warring in Heav'n against Heav'n's matchless King;
Ah wherefore! He deserved no such return
From me, whom he created what I was... (IV, 32-43)

His ego cannot tolerate this new reality, but the Lucifer that has been eternally transformed by his own actions has lost the brilliance he once emitted. Suddenly, he identifies the flaws, “pride and worse ambition,” that instigated his revolt, feels a pang of guilt, blames himself for freely choosing to revolt, and recognizes he cannot escape his torment:

Nay cursed be thou; since against his thy will
Chose freely what it now so justly rues.
Me miserable! Which way shall I fly
Infinite wrath, and infinite despair?
Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell;
And in the lowest deep a lower deep
Still threatening to devour me opens wide,
To which the Hell I suffer sems a Heav'n. (IV, 71-78)

(The “thou” above refers to Satan himself.) How different is Satan’s language from the proud speeches in Books I and II. Here, he blames himself for his punishment and “rues” the choice he made in rebelling against God. His torment is excruciating, scorching his body and his mind. That torment makes him wonder that if he were to “submit,” would God’s forgiveness be possible. But his “Disdain,” for “that word” and his “dread of shame / Among the spirits beneath” make doing so impossible. As he wrestles with what he might do, he sinks deeper into despair:

O then at last relent: is there no place
Left for repentance, none for pardon left?
None left but by submission; and that word
Disdain forbids me, and my dread of shame
Among the spirits beneath, whom I seduced
With other promises and other vaunts
Than to submit, boasting I could subdue
Th' Omnipotent. Ay me, little know
How dearly I abide that boast so vain,
Under what torments inwardly I groan;
While they adore me on the throne of Hell,
With diadem and scepter high advanced
The lower still I fall, only supreme
In misery; such joy ambition finds. (IV, 79-92)

In Satan’s despair we see the remorse that could lead to contrition and to readmission to heaven. But he does consider how repenting might restore him to his former state:

But say I could repent and could obtain
By act of grace my former state; how soon
Would highth recall high thoughts, how soon unsay
What feigned submission swore: ease would recant
vows made in pain, as violent and void.
For never can true reconcilement grow
Where wounds of deadly hate have pierced so deep... (IV, 93-99)

Satan concludes that his pride will never enable him to repent and therefore forgiveness will never be his. He ends his soliloquy with the resolute conviction to pursue his revenge:

So farewell hope, and with hope farewell fear,
Farewell remorse: all good to me is lost;
Evil be thou my good; by thee at least
Divided Empire with Heav'n's King I hold
By thee, and more than half perhaps will reign;
As man ere long, and this new world shall know.

We begin to see the real Satan—the arrogant and prideful angel of Death who finally admits his deep loss of God’s glory. Satan knows he is the embodiment of Hell to which his ego can never accept defeat. His resentment tells him that although he could repent and be readmitted to God’s grace, his “deadly hate” would never allow him to submit. Seeing Satan fully wrapped up in his gloating and despair, it enables us to contrast him with what we realize is God’s goodness even though we may be uncomfortable with his fatherly sternness.  

Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind"

      Percy Shelley is one of the great 19th century Romantic poets. Unfortunately, his poems have not always enjoyed high praise from all who have read his work. For instance, the poet T. S. Eliot once dismissed Shelley, writing that “The Ideas of Shelley seem to me always to be ideas of adolescence…I find his ideas repellent.” In spite of this critical judgment, Eliot’s own poetry was influenced by Shelley’s, and later in his life Eliot even acknowledged the profundity of Shelley’s final unfinished poem “The Triumph of Life.” Among critics today, there isn’t much dispute about the quality of Shelley’s poetry. But that quality does not assure that someone reading Shelley’s poems for the first time will find them inspiring or even interesting. That is true because his poems can often extend well beyond a reader’s comprehension. His most anthologized poem, “Ode to the West Wind” exemplifies this point.

                            Ode to the West Wind
                                             I
O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, lie ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O Thou,              5
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed

The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse within 'tis grave, until
Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow

Her clarion e'er the dreaming earth, and fill         10
(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)
With living hues and odours plain and hill:

Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;
Destroyer and Preserver; hear, O hear!

                                             II
Thou on whose stream, 'mid the steep sky's commotion, 15
Loose clouds like Earth's decaying leaves are shed,
Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean,

Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread
On the blue surface of thine airy surge,
Like the bright hair uplifted from the head           20

Of some fierce Maenad, even from the dim verge
Of the horizon to the zenith's height,
The locks of the approaching storm.  Thou dirge

Of the dying year, to which tis closing night
Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre                  25
Vaulted with all thy congregated might

Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere
Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst: O hear!

                                             III
Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams
The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,                 30
Lulled by the coil of his crystalline streams,

Beside a pumice isle in Baiae's bay,
And saw in sleep old palaces and towers
Quivering within the wave's intenser day,

All overgrown with azure moss and flowers             35
So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou
For whose path the Atlantic's level's powers

Cleave themselves into chasm, while far below
The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear
The sapless foliage of the ocean, know                40

Thy voice, and suddenly grow grey with fear,
And tremble and despoil themselves: O hear!

                                             IV
If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;
If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;
A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share           45

The impulse of thy strength, only less free
Than thou, O Uncontrollable! If even
I were as in my boyhood, and could be

The comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven,
As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed             50
Scarce seemed a vision; I would ne'er have striven

As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.
Oh! lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!

A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed         55
One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.

                                               V
Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies                    60

Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!          65
And, by the incantation of this verse,

Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawakened Earth

The trumpet of prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?            70       

The first thing to know about this poem is that the Romantic poets (e.g. Coleridge, Wordsworth) connected the wind with the changing of the seasons, from autumn through winter and into spring. Shelley begins his poem by addressing the west wind as a “Wild Spirit” and depicting through his imagery this “Wind” as an animated presence that has the power to bring death and rebirth on earth. It drives the dead “Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red” leaves from the trees and “chariotest” the “winged seeds” to “their dark wintry” beds, where they “lie cold and low,/Each like a corpse…until/Thine azure sister (west wind) of the Spring” blows her trumpet and the world is reborn with “sweet buds” and fills “With living hues and odours plain and hill.” At the end of section I Shelley calls to the wind to “hear” him. What he wishes to communicate with this awesome “presence” is withheld until sections IV and V of the poem.

In section II of the poem, Shelley lifts his eyes to the sky and sees “clouds,” which his imagination connects to the dying leaves of section I. However, something rather unexpected and strange happens. Those clouds/leaves become “Angels of rain and lightning” which then become “Like the bright hair uplifted from the head/Of some fierce Maenad…/The locks of the approaching storm.” Shelley’s similes have taken us from analogies of fall and spring to biblical/apocalyptic imagery to the imagery of the frenzied women of the Greek myth of Dionysus, who was believed to die each fall and rise each spring. At the end of this section, he once again calls to the wind, asking it to “hear” him. The reader must wonder, what is it Shelley seeks? The first section suggests Shelley wants to express and celebrate the changing seasons and the cycle of life. But here the biblical and Greek imagery conveys something much more.

In section III, Shelley’s imagination looks seaward, to the Mediterranean and the Atlantic and envisions the west wind’s effect upon the waters. The wind’s “presence” awakens the Mediterranean from its “summer dreams” to mirror the “palaces and towers,” Roman emperors built above Baiae bay near Naples and now “All overgrown with azure moss and flowers/So sweet, the sense faints picturing them.” After his looking backward to Ancient Rome, Shelley pictures the Atlantic and sees the west wind cleaving its waves into “chasms,” while in the depths below, “The sapless foliage of the ocean, know/Thy voice, and suddenly grow grey with fear,/And tremble and despoil themselves.” The key word in the passage is the verb “know,” and in this section, Shelley affirms that like the leaves and clouds of the previous sections, the waters of Baiae Bay, the Atlantic’s waves, and the vegetation beneath the sea all “know” the west wind’s voice and obey its commands. Again, he cries “O hear!”

In the last two sections of the poem Shelley reveals what it is he wants the wind to “hear.” In lines 43-45, Shelley imagines himself as an object of the Wind’s power. Perhaps by being blown about by the wind, Shelley could “share” “The impulse of thy (wind’s) strength.” He remembers when he was young that the imagination of his “boyhood,” made him a “comrade” of the wind’s “wandering…to outstrip the skiey speed.” For the Romantic poets, childhood imagination, uncontaminated by the adult knowledge that can manacle it, could receive spiritual insights from nature. But this experience, freely open to those in childhood innocence, is no longer available to the adult Shelley. A way to receive the wind’s spirit is told in the next line: “I would never have striven/As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.” Striving with the wind in “prayer”? If Shelley’s language sounds familiar, that is because it has echoes of biblical characters (e.g. the Psalms, Job) who call on God to relieve their suffering. For the first time in the poem, he directly appeals to the wind and cries out for it to “lift [him] as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!” because “I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!/A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed/One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.” According to Shelley, the wind possesses the power to heal him, to relieve his suffering, to lift him beyond the limits of ordinary life. But he remains frustrated in his “striving” to be as the leaves, clouds and sea until in the final section he discovers a means to unchain his spirit.

In this concluding section, Shelley returns to Greek myth with the first four words: “Make me thy lyre.” The “lyre” is the Eolian lyre (it was also called a harp) is a musical instrument that produces sounds when the wind passes through its strings. The Greek poet and prophet Orpheus could charm all animate and inanimate objects with its music. Envisioning himself as the musical instrument upon which the west wind can play its harmonies, he can receive the “Spirit fierce” of the west wind, become one with that spirit, “Be thou me, impetuous one!” and have his “dead thoughts” driven “over the universe/Like withered leaves to quicken new birth!” The thoughts fall dead to the ground but are “quicken[ed] to a new birth” by the wind. The poem accelerates through lines 65-70, and Shelley rises like a poet/prophet calling on humanity to hear in his voice “the incantation of this verse,” which will “Scatter” his “words” among mankind!” This “incantation” will awaken humanity through the prophetic power of Shelley’s words: “Be through my lips to unawakened Earth/The Trumpet of a prophecy!” Finally able to receive the inspiration the west wind breathes into all life, Shelley is quietly confident and whispers the poem’s conclusion: “O Wind,/If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”  

Thomas Traherne

      Thomas Traherne (1636-1674) was an Anglican clergyman and mystical writer who has often been associated with the Metaphysical poets John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan and Richard Crashaw. His poetry was largely unknown until a manuscript of his poems was discovered by William Brooke in a London bookstall in 1897. Many of Traherne’s poems employ metaphors that illustrate his understanding of the relationship between the physical and spiritual worlds. “Shadows in the Water” is one of his most popular poems and an interesting illustration of his work:

            Shadows in the Water

In unexperienc'd Infancy
Many a sweet Mistake doth lye:
Mistake tho false, intending true;
A Seeming somewhat more than View;
   That doth instruct the Mind                5
   In Things that lye behind,
And many Secrets to us show
Which afterwards we come to know.

Thus did I by the Water's brink
Another World beneath me think;
And while the lofty spacious Skies
Reversed there abused mine Eyes,
   I fancy'd other Feet
   Came mine to touch or meet;
As by some Puddle I did play
Another World within it lay.

Beneath the Water People drown'd,
Yet with another Heaven crown'd,
In spacious Regions seem'd to go
As freely moving to fro:
   In bright and open Space
   I say their very face;
Eyes, Hands, and Feet they had like mine;
Another Sun did with them shine.

'Twas strange that People there should walk,
And yet I could not hear them talk:
That thro a little watry Chink,
Which one dry Ox or Horse might drink,
   We other Worlds should see,
   Yet not admitted be;
And other Confines there behold
Of Light and Darkness, Heat and Cold.

I call'd them oft, but call'd in vain'
No Speeches we could entertain:
Yet did I there expect to find
Some other World, to please my mine.
   I plainly saw by these
   A new Antipodes,
Whom, tho they were so plainly seen,
A Film kept off that stood between.

By walking Men's reversed Feet
I chanc'd another World to meet;
Tho it did not to View exceed
A Phantasm, 'tis a World indeed,
   Where Skies beneath us shine,
   And Earth by Art divine
Another face presents below
Where People's feet against Ours go.

Within the Regions of the Air,
Compassed about with Heavens fair,
Great Tracks of Lands there may be found
Enriched with Fields and fertile Ground:
   Where many numerous Hosts,
   In those far distant Coasts,
For other great and glorious Ends,
Inhabit, my yet unknown Friends.

O ye that stand upon the Brink,
Whom I so near me, thro the Chink,
With Wonder see; What faces there,
Whose feet, whose Bodies, do ye wear?
   I my Companions see
   In You, another me.
They seemed Others, but are We;
Our second Selves those Shadow be.

Look how far off those lower Skies
Extend themselves! scarce with mine Eyes
I can them reach.  O ye my Friends,
What Secret borders on those Ends?
   Are lofty Heavens hurl'd
   'Bout your inferior World?
Are ye the Representatives
Of other People's distant Lives?

Of all the Play-mates which I knew
That here I do the Image view
In other Selves; what can it mean?
But that below the purling Stream
   Some unknown Joys there be
   Laid up in store for me;
To which I shall, when that thin Skin
Is broken, be admitted in.

This ten-stanza poem moves through two points of view, the innocent imagination of the child’s and the inspired vision of the believing Christian. By the poem’s end, the speaker reconciles what he saw as a child with what he envisions through his faith in Christianity. The first stanza prefigures a pattern of the rest of the poem. The speaker begins with the line “In unexperienced infancy,” a phrase which denotes innocent childhood, and follows by announcing an obvious characteristic common to that stage of life: “Many a sweet mistake doth lie.” He says that “though false, [these mistakes are] intending true,” then describes them as “A seeming somewhat more than view.” That “seeming” is important, because what appears to be true or real to the speaker as a child isn’t, but nevertheless has value, since it “instruct[s] the mind,” by offering him a glimpse of the “many secrets” he will “come to know” in his adulthood. In the rest of the poem, the speaker recalls how in his “unexperienced infancy” his imagination interpreted the reflections he saw in a puddle and how he interprets those images as an adult.

Stanza 2 starts with the speaker picturing himself as a child, standing by the edge of a puddle and viewing the reflections the world above cast in the water at his feet. Within that puddle the child saw “Another world,” one that his imagination playfully pretended to be real and not simply a reflection. In stanza 3, his innocent perspective enabled him to imagine that there exists “another Heaven” of people “freely moving to and fro,” and to see “Eyes, hands, and feet they had like mine.” As a child, this intriguing “world” fascinated him so much so that he desired to “play” within it, but when he attempted to communicate with the images he saw, he was frustrated because he “could not hear them talk.” Puzzled by this inability to communicate with this world, he wondered why “We other Worlds should see/Yet not admitted be”? In stanza 5, he attempted to converse with these images of “people” and “call’d to them oft, but in vain,” At this moment in the poem, the speaker begins to substitute his adult perspective for his childhood one and realizes that “tho they were so plainly seen,/A film kept off that stood between.” That perspective does not discard the metaphor of “Shadows” in “Water”; instead, it repurposes the metaphor to represent his Christian faith in the afterlife. The rest of the poem pursues this trajectory.

In stanza 6, the speaker recognizes the potential of the memory of his childhood experience and uses that perspective in his contemplation of what those “shadows” in the water intimate. He contemplates himself viewing the water as not a childhood fantasy, but as a portal to the spiritual realm. Thus, he now envisions “walking men’s reversed feet” and thereby encounters a second “world” that “Tho it did not to view exceed/A phantom, ‘tis a world indeed,/Where skies beneath us shine,/And earth by art divine/Another face presents below,/Where people’s feet against Ours go.” It is significant to note that at his point in the poem the speaker shifts verb tenses. Through stanzas 2-5.5, his recollection of his childhood puddle experience is expressed in past tense verbs. What he saw in the past has ended, just as the reflection would vanish each time the water would dry up. From here forward, the images he now sees are presented in the present tense, e.g., “‘tis a world indeed,” existing beyond the physical water. What the eyes only see as reflections and therefore a “phantom,” the speaker’s contemplative imagination, with the help of an “art divine,” perceive as spiritual interties existing, as the present tense verbs suggest, eternally.

This speaker’s realization at the end of stanza 6 initiates the vision that in stanza 7 expands further beyond the reflected world his childhood imagination played with. He imagines “the Regions of the Air,/Compassed about with Heavens fair,” the “Great Tracks of Land there” that are “Enriched with Fields and fertile Ground/ Where many numerous hosts/For other great and glorious ends/Inhabit.” The images in this stanza are not a reflection of the world above a puddle, but something far beyond the speaker’s physical world. A place where he eventually will meet his “yet unknown friends,” those he will encounter in eternity. In stanzas 8, he envisions images of the shadows in water, which earlier in the poem were mere reflections of the world above to be the souls of all those who lived and died. He sees them as “Our Second Selves these Shadow be.” Though he can no more communicate with these “shadows” than he could speak with the reflections he saw as child, he feels an inextricable bond and joy with those he envisions. The poem's final two stanzas express that joy in the rhetorical questions it asks and answers.

Stanzas 9 and 10 overflow with the joy the speaker feels as he reaches the climax of his contemplation. He looks up to the sky and asks his “yet unknown Friends” cosmic questions about the universe: “What secret borders” demarcate the skies, and “are lofty Heavens hurl’d/’bout your inferior World?” He wonders if the lives that inhabit “distant lives” are also only “representatives,” physical bodies containing souls to be released into eternity upon death. His visions then inspires him in the final stanza to anticipate the heavenly bliss that awaits him upon his own death:

Of all the Play-mates which I knew
That here I do the Image view
In other Selves, what can it mean?
But that below the purling Stream
   Some unknown Joys there be
   Laid up in store for me;
To which I shall, when that thin Skin
Is broken, be admitted in.

The speaker asks, “That here I do the Image view/ In other Selves, what can it mean?” Then he answers that the boundary between earth and heaven will be transcended, the “film…that stood between” (40) him and eternity will be “broken,” and inevitably he will “be admitted” into the kingdom of Heaven. Traherne’s obvious confidence that “unknown joys” of heavenly resurrection await him when he dies makes for a startling contrast with the doubt and anxiety that fill religious poetry of John Donne. Maybe the reader finds Traherne’s faith too easy and prefers the grueling struggles Donne puts himself through. Even so, Traherne’s poems deserve the attention the other Metaphysical poets merit.

Twelve Days of Christmas Poems

     The Christmas season grows longer each year; now, I see decorations rising here and there even before the Halloween candy has been passed out to all the kids. Then, suddenly Christmas decorations will be pulled down, packed up and stored in basements and attics until the next season begins. Not many people are aware that Christmas Day begins the Twelve Days of Christmas ending with the Feast of the Epiphany. The word “Epiphany” means revelation or manifestation. The western tradition of the Epiphany acknowledges the visit of the Magi to the baby Jesus. And those twelve days should be remembered, if not for religious reasons, then for poetic ones. To commemorate the often forgotten Twelve Days of Christmas, I am offering 12 poems, one to be read each day until January 6th. Some are religious, some joyous, some secular, and some brooding.

Day 1: Excepts from “The Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” by John Milton (1608-1674).

                                                 I
This is the month, and this the happy morn
Wherein the Son of heaven'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.

                                                 II
That glorious form, that light unsufferable,
And that far-beaming blaze of majesty,
Wherewith he wont at heaven'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 a darksome house of mortal clay.

                                               III
Say heavenly 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 heaven by the sun's team untrod,
Hath took no print of the approaching host keep watch in squadrons 
bright?

                                               IV
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 hour first, thy Lord to greet, 
     And join thy voice unto the angel quire,
From out his secret alar touched with hallowed fire.

                                         The Hymn
                                                  I
It was the winter wild,
While the heaven-born-child
     All meanly wrapped in the rude manger lies;
Nature in awe to him
Had doffed her gaudy trim,
     With her great master so to sympathize:
It was no season then for her
To wanton with the sun her lusty parmour.

                                                  II
Only with speeches fair
She woos the gently air
     To hide her guilty front with innocent snow,
And on her naked shame,
Pollute with sinful blame,
     The saintly veil of maiden white to throw,
Confounded that her maker's eyes
Should look so near upon her foul deformities.      

                                                  III
But he her fears to cease,
Sent down the meek-eyed Peace,
     She crowed with green, came softly sliding
Down through the turning sphere
His ready harbinger,
     With turtle wing, the amorous clouds dividing;
And waving wide her myrtle wand,
She strikes a universal peace through the sea and land.

                                                  IV
No war, or battle's sound
Was heard the world around
     The idle spear and shield were high uphung
The hooked chariot stood
Unstained with hostile blood,
     The trumpet spake not to the armed throng,
And kings sat still with awful eye,
As if they surely knew their sovran Lord was by.

                                                  V
But peaceful was the night
Wherein the Prince of Light
     His reign of peace upon the earth began:
The winds with wonder whist,
Smoothly the waters kissed,
     Whispering new joys to the mild ocean,
Who now hath quite forgot to rave,
While birds of calm sit brooding on the charmed wave...

                                                    XV
Yea Truth, and Justice then
Will down return to men,
     Orbed in a rainbow; and like glories wearing
Mercy will sit between,
Throned in celestial sheen,
     With radiant feet the tissued clouds down steering,
And heaven as at some festival,
Will open wide the gates of her high palace hall.

                                                       XVI
But wisest fate says no,
This must not yet be so,
     The babe lies yet in smiling infancy,
That on the bitter cross
Must redeem our loss;
     So both himself and us to glorify:
Yet first to those ychained in sleep,
The wakeful trump of doom must thunder through the deep.

The peace and joy of Christ’s birth brings, which is celebrated each Christmas day, is set aside by Milton. Instead, he lays out the full consequence of this birth. Christ is born to redeem the world, to judge ultimately the human race, to save or condemn the worthy and unworthy. To accomplish this, first, Christ must die on the cross, rise from death, and finally return to judge the living and the dead. This early poem by Milton anticipates his epic of the story of Adam and Eve and original sin: Paradise Lost.

Day 2: “Christ’s Nativity,” by Henry Vaughan (1621-1695)

                                   I
Awake, glad heart! Get up and sing,
It is the birthday of the King,
     Awake! Awake!
     The sun doth shake
Light from his locks, and all the way
Breathing perfumes, doth spice the day.

Awake, awake! Hark, how the woods rings
Winds whisper, and the busy springs
     A consort make;
     Awake, awake!
Man is their high-priest, and should rise
To offer up the sacrifice.

I would I were some bird or star,
Fluttering in woods, or lifted liar far
     Above this inn
     And road of sin!
Then either star, or bird, should be
Shining,or singing still to Thee.

I would I had in my best part
Fit rooms for Thee! Or my heart 
     Were so clean as
     Thy manger was!
But I am all filth, and obscure,
Yet if Thou wilt, Thou canst make clean.

Sweet Jesu! will then; Let no more
This leper haunt, and soil Thy door,
     Curse him, ease him
     O release him!
And let once more by mystic birth
The Lord of life be born in earth.

                                   II
How kind is heaven to Man! If here
     One sinner doth amend
Straight there is joy, and every sphere
     In music doth contend;
And shall we then no voices lift?
     Are mercy, and salvation
Not worth our thanks? Is life a gift
     Of no more acceptation?
Shall He that did come down from thence,
     Of all His woes remain?
Can neither Love, nor sufferings bind?
     Are we all stone, and earth?
Neither His bloody passions mind,
     Nor one day bless His birth?
Alas, my God! Thy birth now here
Must not be numbered in the year.

The first two stanzas are pure praise for the birth of Christ, beginning with

Awake glad heart! get up and sing!
It is the birthday of thy King
Awake! Awake.

The speaker calls on you to celebrate and conveys a rapturous anticipation for the event of Christ’s birth. The air is filled with the sun’s light and perfumes fill the air. In the second stanza, the natural world of winds, woods, and streams create a congenial concert—all of which symbolize the importance of the day. When the speaker says that man “should rise/To offer up the sacrifice” at the second stanza, the poem shifts to man’s imperfections, “I would I were some bird, or star,” but the speaker knows man’s imperfections make him unworthy and wishes “that my heart/Were so clean as/Thy manger was!” Therefore, man can only ask for Redemption:

 Sweet Jesus will then; Let no more
This leper haunt, and soil Thy door,
   Cure him, ease him
   O release him!
And let once more by mystic birth
The Lord of life be born in earth.

The poem not only celebrates Christ’s birth, but also man’s desire to be worthy of that divine birth. The speaker yearns for forgiveness through a sublime experience.

Day 3: “The Burning Babe,” Robert Southwell SJ (1561-1595)

As I in hoary winter night stood shivering in the snow,
Surprised I was with sudden heat which made my heart to glow;
And lifting up a fearful eye to view what fire was near,
A pretty Babe all burning bright did in the air appear;
Who, scorched with excessive heat, such floods of tears did shed
As though his floods should quench his flames which with his tears were fed.
"Alas!" quoth he, "but newly born, in fiery hearts I fry,
Yet none approach to warm their hearts or feel my fire but I!
My faultless breast the furnace is, the fuel wounding thorns,
Love is the fire and sighs the smoke, the ashes shame and scorns;
The fuel Justice layeth on, and Mercy blows the coals,
The metal in this furnace wrought are men's defiled souls,
For which, as now on fire I am to work them to their good,
    So will I melt into a bath to wash them in my blood."
    With this he vanished out of sight and swiftly shrunk away,
    And straight I called unto mind that it was Christmas day.

Southwell’s poem is one of the most shocking readers will come across in this post. This strange poem begins with the speaker out on a frigid winter night when he feels himself warmed by something above him. He is struck then by the sight of a burning Babe hovering in the air, who as he burns, has tears pouring from his eyes. While he wonders why the tears do not extinguish the flames, the burning babe begins to speak to him. The Babe explains the reasons for the fire and the tears. They represent God’s love and compassion for the fallen human race. Certainly, that notion will strike many readers as rather odd. But perhaps even more mystifying is the fuel of the fire, which the Babe tells the speaker are “wounding thorns.” These thorns symbolize the crown of thorns that his torturers will fasten to his head and strike with sticks during the hours prior to his execution. As in Milton’s poem, this Christmas poem is no adoring celebration of Jesus’s birth but, portends the bloody torture and crucifixion he will suffer for the salvation of the human race. A brief note about Robert Southwell might explain his inclination to conceive of the nativity as he did. Southwell was a Jesuit priest who clandestinely administered the outlawed Catholic sacraments in England during the reign of Elizabeth I. He knew he risks being captured and brutally tortured and killed if caught, but believed the suffering he would have to endure would be a duty and an honor for a Catholic priest. He wrote, “let them draw us upon hurdles, hang us, unbowel us alive, mangle us, boil us, set our quarters upon their gates, to be meat for birds of the air…” It seems likely that his fervent religious belief influenced the imagery he employed in his poetry. Anyway, he got what he wished for: In 1592, he was captured by Richard Topcliffe, tortured for two years, then hanged, drawn and quartered in 1595.

Day 4: “The Oxen,” by Thomas Hardy (1840)

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.
"Now they are all on their knees."
As elder said as we sat in a flock
By the embers in hearthside.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where
They dwelt in their strawy pen,
Nor did it occur to one of us there
To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few would weave 
In these years! Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve,"
Come; see the oxen kneel,

"I the lonely barton by yonder coomb
Our childhood used to know,"
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might so.

“The Oxen” was published in the Times of London, on Christmas Eve, 1915. In the first half of the poem, the speaker is remembering a Christmas Eve many years ago when he was a child. The second half shifts to the time in which it was written, 1915, when Hardy was 65 years old. So much simpler than the three previous poems, yet no less powerful, Hardy juxtaposes pure childhood belief with adult nostalgic yearning.

Day 5: “Journey of The Magi” by T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)

“A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter."
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel at night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of  silver,
And feet kicking the empty wineskins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

“The Journey of the Magi” was published in 1927, a year after Eliot converted to Anglicanism and critics have suggested that the poem is an allegorical representation of Eliot’s religious struggles. Be that as it may, the poem reimagines the biblical story in the Gospel of Matthew the Magi’s journey to pay homage to the new king of the Jews, the infant Jesus with gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. One of the Magi recounts the journey’s difficulties, their reaction to the infant Jesus and what the experience ultimately meant to him. In stanza 1, the speaker candidly complains about the weather, the accommodations, the hostility of people they met, their lack of sleep and the thought this journey was a mistake. Stanza 2 includes imagery that intimates a vision of Jesus’s betrayal and crucifixion and the curious reaction the Magi have once they encounter the infant Jesus. Finally, stanza 3 reveals the profound transformation, the epiphany, the speaker experiences as a result of this visit. Birth and death become reversed and the pagan gods he once worshipped are banished to oblivion.

Day 6: “The Magi,” by William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

Now as at all times I can see in the mind’s eye,
In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones
Appear and disappear in the blue depths of the sky
With all their ancient faces like rain-beaten stones,
And all their helms of silver hovering side by side,
and all their eyes still fixed, hoping to find once more,
Being by Calvary's turbulence unsatisfied,
The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.

In this rather ambiguous poem, Yeats takes the story of the Magi shapes it to align with his own theory that the birth of Christ would not ultimately result in the end of history with Christ’s death, resurrection and second coming. Yeats believed that history moved in two-thousand-year cycles and Christ and Christianity were just one cycle in this continuous movement. Thus, he envisions the Magi as “unsatisfied” by Jesus’s birth and his death, “Calvary’s turbulence.” To see what Yeats thought would follow the era of Christian, see his poem “The Second Coming.”

Day 7: “In Memoriam A. H. H.,” (Sect. 106) by Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892)

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
  The flying cloud, the frosty light:
  The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
  Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
  The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind,
  For those that here we see no more;
  Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,
  And ancient forms of party strife;
  Ring in the noble modes of life,
With sweeter manner, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
  The faithless coldness of the times;
  Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes,
But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,
  The civic slander and the spite;
  Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
  Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
  Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,
  The larger heart, the kinder hand;
  Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.

Tennyson’s poem was written for his closest friend and confidant, Arthur Hallam, who died suddenly when he was twenty-two years old. Profoundly grief stricken by his death, he wrote this elegy for him over a period of seventeen years, composing 131 sections of the work, which numbers nearly 3000 lines. The poem is more than simply an elegy as Tennyson reflects on several ideas and issues that affected Victorians during the rapidly changing time in which they lived. Of course, the section above is about the change from the old year to the new. Tennyson directly addresses Christmas in sections 28,78,108.

Day 8: “In the Bleak Midwinter,” by Christina Rossetti (1830-1894)

In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made a moan,
Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter, long ago.

Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him, nor earth sustain;
Heaven and earth shall flee away when He comes to reign."
In the bleak midwinter a stable place sufficed
The Lord God Almighty, Jesus Christ.

Enough for Him, whom cherubim, worship night and day,
Breastful of milk, and a mangerful of hay;
Enough for Him, whom angels fall before,
The ox and ass and camel which adore.

Angels and archangels may have gathered there,
Cherubim and seraphim thronged the air;
But His mother only, in her maiden bliss,
Worshipped the beloved with a kiss.

What can I give Him, poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd, I would bring him a lamb;
If I were a Wise Man, I would do my part;
Yet What I can give Him: my heart.

This is another nativity poem, which became a popular carol sang in English churches. The poem begins with an image of a “bleak midwinter” of cold and snow for the Christmas Nativity setting. This ominous beginning is followed by a series of contrasts. In stanza 2, “heaven cannot hold him,” yet earth will not be able to sustain him. Ironically, when “He comes to reign” both “Heaven and earth shall flee away.” Despite his awesome power, a lowly “stable-place” will “suffice” for his birth. This contrast continues in stanza 3 where angels worship “Him” and “Fall down before Him” as he lay sleeping on hay among an ox and an ass. The angels seem to dominate stanza 4 until the solitary figure of “His Mother” Mary appears and with maternal love bestows “a kiss” on the sleeping infant. As the poem concludes, the persona of a speaker slips, and Rossetti herself affirms her presence and the conviction of her Christian faith as she humbly offers to give Jesus her complete devotion-her heart. Her humility mirrors the humility of both Jesus’s birth and his eventual self-sacrifice on the cross.

Day 9: “A Christmas Carol,” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)

I
The shepherds went their hasty way,
   And found the lowly stable-shed
Where the Virgin-Mother lay:
   And now they checked their eager tread,     
For the babe, that at her bosom clung,
A Mother's song the Virgin-Mother sung.

II
They told her how a glorious light,
   Streaming from a heavenly throng,
Around them shone, suspending night!
   While sweeter than a mother's song,
Blest Angles heralded the Saviour's birth!
Glory to God on high! and Peace on Earth.

III
She listened to the tale divine,
   And closer still the Babe she pressed;
And while she cried, the Babe is mine!
   The milk rushed faster to her breast:
Joy rose within her, like a summer's morn;
Peace, Peace on Earth! the Prince of Peace is born.

IV
Thou Mother of the Prince of Peace,
   Poor, simple, and of low estate!
That Strife should vanish, Battle cease,
   O why should this thy soul elate?
Sweet Music's loudest note, the Poet's story,
Did'st thou ne'er love to hear of Fame and Glory?

V
And is not War a youthful king,
   A stately Hero clad in Mail?
Beneath his footsteps laurels spring;
   Him Earth's majestic monarchs hail
Their friend, their playmate! and his bold bright eye
Compels the maiden's love-confessing sigh.

VI
"Tell this in some more courtly scene,
   To maids and youths in robes of state!
I am a woman poor and mean,
   And therefore is my soul elate.
War is a ruffian, all with guilt defiled,
That from the aged father tears his child!

VII
"A muderous fiend, by fiends adored,
   He kills the Sire and starves the son;
The Husband kill, and from her board
   Steals all his Widow's toil had won;
Plunders God's world of beauty; rends away
all safety from the Night, all comfort from the day. 

VIII
"Then wisely is my soul elate,
   That strife should vanish, battle cease:
I'm poor and of a low estate,
   The Mother of the Prince of Peace.
Joy rises in me, like a summer morn:
Peace, Peace on Earth! the Prince of Peace is born."

Coleridge first published this poem in the Morning Post, December 25th, 1799. When the shepherds arrived at the stable, they are awestruck by the “glorious light/Streaming from a heavenly throng.” But when they learn that the “Babe” will be the “prince of Peace," and that he will bring “Peace on Earth,” they ask Mary why this would elate her. They try to convince her that the traditional heroic qualities Poets have endowed their kings and heroes with should also be her son’s. Doesn’t she know that a true king embodies the martial qualities found in “A stately Hero clad in mail?” “Poor, simple” Mary shrewdly counters the shepherds’ by distinguishing the difference between the fantasy world of the poets and the brutal, bestial reality of war.

Day 10: “I saw a Stable,” by Mary Coleridge (1861-1907)

I saw a stable, low and very bare,
A little child in a manger.
The oxen knew Him, had Him in their care,
To men He was a stranger.
The safety of the world was lying there,
And the world's danger.

Mary Coleridge was the great grandniece of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Her interesting, brief nativity poem warrants comparison with the other nativity poems. The first half is a simply traditional depiction of the babe in the manger. The second half convey mystery and paradox. Coleridge intimates that “A little child in a manger” has been born not only to save mankind, but also to judge humanity.

Day 11: “A Hymn on the Nativity of My Savior,” Ben Jonson (1572-1637)

I sing the birth was born tonight,
The Author both of life and light;
The angels so did sound it,
And like the ravished shepherds said,
Who saw the light, and were afraid,
Yet searched, and true they found it.

The Son of God, the eternal King,
That did us all salvation bring,
And freed the soul from danger;
He whom the whole world could not take,
The Word, which heaven and earth did make,
Was now laid in a manger.

The Father's wisdom willed it so,
The Son's obedience knew no "No,"
Both wills were in one stature;
And as that wisdom had decreed,
The Word was now made Flesh indeed,
And took on Him our nature.

What comfort by Him do we win?
Who made Himself the Prince of sin,
To make us heirs of glory?
To see this Babe, all innocence,
A Martyr born in our defense,
Can man forget this story?

Jonson’s poem commemorates the birth of Christ, seeing his nativity as initiating a new era for the human race. He nimbly juxtaposes the paradox of an “eternal king” with the image of this humble infant lying in the manger. In stanza 3, he alludes to the Gospel of John with “The Word was now made Flesh indeed,” and in stanza 4, tethers Christ’s birth to his sacrifice on the cross. With this short poem, Jonson furnishes us with a polished, terse vision of the two foundational events of Christianity.

Day 12: “The House of Hospitalities,” by Thomas Hardy

Here we broached the Christmas barrel,
   Pushed up the charred log-end;
 Here we sang the Christmas carol,
      And called in friends.

Time has tired me since we met here
   Where the folk now dead were young.
Since the viands were outset here
      And quaint song sung.

And the worm has bored the viol
   That used to lead the tune,
Rust eaten out the dial
      That struck the night's moon.

Now no Christmas brings in neighbours,
   And the New Year comes unlit;
Where we sang the mole now labours,
      And spiders knit.

Yet at midnight if here walking,
   When the moon sheets wall and tree,
I see forms of old time talking,
      Who smile on me.

It might seem sad to end the Twelve Days of Christmas poems with Thomas Hardy, who is known for his fatalism and his dark vision of human existence. Certainly, this poem reveals the speaker’s sadness at the passage of time. In stanzas 1-4, the speaker remembers the past when he and his companions celebrated Christmas compared with his loneliness, the decay he sees around him, and the darkness the new year forebodes for him. Yet, the speaker proposes some hope in the final stanza. He imagines walking under sheets of moonlight and seeing “forms of old time talking” with him. Though the companions of the past are dead, his memory is his house of hospitality and within his imagination he can see and feel those smiles from years past.