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.

Milton On Shakespeare

John Milton will forever hold the second place in the ranking of English poets. His masterpiece Paradise Lost might be unknown today even among your college English majors, but its power and brilliance will always a “fit audience find, though few.” (PL 7, 31) Milton himself was a voracious reader, and it could be argued that his English favorite author was the one who surpassed him in greatness, Shakespeare. Shakespeare (1564-1616) was still active the year Milton (1608-1671) was born. When he was 22 years old, Milton wrote a tribute to Shakespeare, which was also the first poem he published. It appeared in the Second Folio of Shakespeare’s works in 1632:

     On Shakespeare. 1630

What needs my Shakespeare for his honoured bones
The labour of an age in piled stones?
Or that his hallowed relics should be hid
Under a star-ypointing pyramid?
Dear son of memory, great heir of fame,                                                5
What need'st thou such weak witness of thy name?
Thou in our wonder and astonishment
Has built thyself a livelong monument.
For whilst, to the shame of slow-endeavouring art,
Thy easy numbers flow, and that each heart                                          10
Hath from the leaves of thy unvalued book 
Those Delphic lines with deep impression took,
Then thou, our fancy of itself bereaving,
Dost make us marble with too much conceiving,
And so sepulchered in such pomp dost lie                                             15
That kings for such a tomb would wish to die.

In the first four lines, Milton praises Shakespeare with two rhetorical questions that effectively dismiss any reason to construct physical monuments honoring Shakespeare’s memory. Great kings and pharaohs might require “stone” monuments, so people do not forget their names, but Shakespeare himself has built something equally enduring. His “fame” endures through the plays and poems he wrote. But how was Shakespeare capable of producing what he did? Well, no one can really say where such talent or genius comes from; so instead, Milton symbolically suggests that Shakespeare is the “Dear son of memory.” Here, Milton is alluding to Mnemosyne the Titaness goddess of memory, who is the mother of the nine muses of inspiration in Greek mythology and by doing so, suggests Shakespeare has created works that exist beyond the process of time.

If the poem were to end at line 8, Milton’s effusive praise would have told us only half the story. After line 8, Milton continues to laud Shakespeare’s work, but in his adulation a current of anxiety slips to the surface. Milton, whose early ambition was to become a great poet himself, could not help but admire Shakespeare, but he also must have felt anxious writing so soon after the publication of the Second Folio, which might make any aspiring young poet doubt the quality of his own work. That doubt ripples through the second half of the poem. Unlike the first eight lines that assert in deliberate, separate sentences, each forming a unit of exuberant praise, the second half of the poem is a single sentence that accelerates the poem’s tempo by refusing to stop after each couplet and incudes self-deprecating remarks about his own abilities. It is as if after acknowledging Shakespeare’s eminence, young Milton is in a hurry to finish a poem that not only recognizes the talent of this playwright but acknowledges also his own lesser talents as a poet.

In line 9, Milton specifically compares his own efforts as a poet with Shakespeare’s. Given Shakespeare’s brilliance, writing great works came naturally to him, or so Milton presumed, but for Milton writing poetry is a grueling labor. “For whilst, to [Milton’s] shame of slow-endeavouring art,/Thy [Shakespeare’s] easy numbers flow.” Contrasting his own exertions with Shakespeare’s “easy numbers” seems to have stung Milton’s ego, but perhaps even more discouraging to the young aspiring poet Milton are all those “Delphic lines” (prophetic) that display Shakespeare’s oracular power to plumb the variety and depth of human experience. From lines 13-14, it clear that the act of reading Shakespeare’s plays astonishes Milton, but it also bereaves his imagination (fancy) by making him another “marble” monument to Shakespeare.

As the poem concludes, Milton tells us that Shakespeare is “so sepulchred in such pomp dost lie/That kings for such a tomb would wish to die.” Just shy of twenty-two and determined to be a great poet, Milton must have felt that awkward, competitive ambivalence poets can feel about a great poet they revere. Fortunately for Milton, it did not impede him, and he lived long enough to acquire the knowledge he needed to combine with his extraordinary talent to finally write the great epic, Paradise Lost, which elevated him alongside Shakespeare in the pantheon of greatest English poets.

Oh, Those Circus Animals!

      William Butler Yeats lived a long and productive life as a great poet. One of his greatest poems, “Sailing to Byzantium,” tells how his old age has rendered him “An aged man is but a paltry thing,/A tattered coat upon a stick.” But this diminished physical condition, at least, did not impede his creativity, as the poems in his finest collection The Tower demonstrate. Up until the last year of his life, Yeats’s creativity flowed unabated, until in this final year, his confidence was shaken as he was trying to find a theme for a new poem. Yeats struggled for weeks to find a “theme,” and then, happily, that struggle finally produced “The Circus Animals’ Desertion.” (1938)

         The Circus Animals' Desertion
                                 1
I sought a theme and sought for in vain,
I sought it daily for six weeks or so.
Maybe at last being but a broken man,
I must be satisfied with my heart, although
Winter and summer till old age began
My circus animals were all on show,
those stilted boys, that burnished chariot,
Lion and woman and the Lord knows what.

                                 2
What can I but enumerate old themes?
First that sea-rider Oisin led by the nose
Through three enchanted islands, allegorical dreams,
Vain gaiety, vain battle, vain repose,
Themes of the embittered heart, or so it seems,
That might adorn old songs or courtly shows;
But what cared I that set him on to ride,
I, starved for the bosom of his faery bride?

And then counter-truth filled out its play,
The Countess Cathleen was the name I gave it;
She, pity-crazed, had given her soul away,
But masterful Heaven had intervened to save it.
I thought my dear must her own soul destroy,
So did fanaticism and hate enslave it,
And this brought forth a dream and soon enough 
This dream itself had all my thought and love.

And when the Fool and Blind Man stole the bread
Cuchulain fought the ungovernable sea;
heart-mysteries there, and yet when all is said
It was the dream itself enchanted me:
Character isolated by a deed
To engross the present and dominate memory.
Payers and painted stage took all my love,
And not those things that they were emblems of.

                                    3
Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that the raving slut
Who keeps the till.  Now that my ladder's gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start,
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart. (1938)

The poem begins with Yeats being unable to find a theme for what he wants to write. He feels he is a “broken man,” and the “circus animals” that once inspired his imagination have now abandoned him in “old age.” This obvious writer’s block induces him to say, “I must be satisfied” with my heart,” which seems vague, and he then alludes with typical Yeatsian ambiguity to “stilted boys,” a “burnished chariot,” a “Lion and woman,” and “Lord knows what.” These unfamiliar references should not confuse the reader; after a lifetime of writing poems and plays, Yeats simply means he had assembled quite an array of characters who represent the themes he sought and found in the past. What to make of “I must be satisfied with my heart,” is a different matter, and can be understood by a similar reference later in the poem.

In stanza 2, at the beginning of section 2, Yeats surrenders to the writer’s block and admits, “What can I but “enumerate old themes?” He recalls “The Wandering of Oisin,” (1889) his narrative poem in which the Irish hero Oisin leaves his land to follow a fairy lady to a fairy land and then returns 150 years later to discover that all his friends are dead, and Ireland has been converted to Christianity. In stanza 3, Yeats sums up his play The Countess Cathleen, an Irish legend in which a woman sells her soul to the devil to get food for the starving people of Ireland. And in stanza 4, he recalls his play, On Baile’s Strand in which the mad Irish legendary hero Cuchulain dies fighting the ocean’s waves after he been tricked into fighting and killing his son.

Yeats did not know, as we do now, that what he was experiencing would be called a writer’s block. But could that block withstand the creative power that always kindled Yeats’s imagination?  And does simply enumerating “old themes” achieve what Yeats was struggling to find? After reading the poem, the answer to both is a resounding yes. With each perfectly crafted stanza Yeats arouses in the reader a profound sympathy. We feel the ache and frustration old age inflicts on the still vibrant mind of the poet who refuses to surrender his craft and creativity. We also see and feel something special that inspired Yeats when young to create poems and plays that transcend the everyday, the commonplace. In all the stanzas that follow the initial one, Yeats remembers the passion within him that fired his imagination to write those early works. In writing Oisin, he recalls how “being “starved for the bosom of his faery bride,” in The Countess Cathleen, how the “dream itself [that] had “all my thought and love” and in On Baile Strand, how the “Players and painted stage took all my love.” It is not the themes, or the characters that make his poem[s] and plays enduring works of art, but the passion that they embody.

In section 3 of the poem, Yeats begins by observing how “Those masterful images because complete/ Grew in pure mind,” as if they were the product of some Platonic, ideal realm that forges fully formed works of art into reality. But then he swerves into a question and asks, “but out of what began?” Here he delves into the genuine source of creativity, his “heart.” And though he believes at first “being but a broken man,/I must be satisfied my heart,” since his search for “new” circus animals to conduct had failed him, he discovers through the very struggle of writing this poem and sifting through his “old themes,” that inspiration and new themes must be “sought” not abstractly, but “In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart,” in the deep, everyday passions that he still feels.  

Keats's To Autumn

     The last great poem John Keats wrote was his ode “To Autumn.” Perhaps it is fitting that it was his final poem, since it is, as Harold Bloom said, “the subtlest and most beautiful of all Keats’s odes, and as close to perfection as any shorter poem in the English language.” It is also fitting that a poem of the harvest and one about the season that ends the year was his last great ode, since Keats’s own brief life would end just two years later.

To Autumn

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
   Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
   With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage trees,
   And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
      To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernal; to set budding more,
   And still more, later flowers for the bees.
   Until they think warm days will never cease,
      For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
   Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may fine
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
   Thy soft hair-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,
   Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
   Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
   Steady thy laden head across a brook;
   Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
      Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of spring? Ay, where are they?
   Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,--
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
   And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
   Among the river shallows, borne aloft
      Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
   Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
   And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

Even though “To Autumn” does not inspire in readers the feelings of dramatic heartbreak that, say, “To a Nightingale,” does, the poem overwhelms us with a beauty and bounty even as it is taking us toward that final season, winter. The first stanza fills the reader’s sense of sight with a lush profusion of vegetation as personified Autumn conspires with the “maturing sun” to “load,” “bless,” “bend,” “fill,” “swell,” and “plump,” the harvest that will be gathered and enjoyed. But the extraordinary richness of the imagery can also be felt, and each time we read this stanza we not only see that profusion but also feel the warmth of that “maturing sun.” And even though that “maturing sun” means also winter is coming, Keats lets us loaf for a while in this perfect setting believing too that this season of abundance will last.

After we reach the end of stanza 1, we might anticipate encountering in the next stanza personified Autumn, with her scythe gleaning vigorously the bounty of this harvest. Instead, stanza 2 invites us to imagine languorous Autumn “amid her store,” or “sitting careless on the granary floor,” or “sound asleep,/Drows’d with the fume of poppies.” “By a cyder-press, with patient look” she watches “the last oozings hours by hours.” The profusion in the first stanza has sated and intoxicated her with the bounty of the annual harvest. Interestingly, Autumn can only watch passively “the last oozings hour by hour.” She is no longer the agent of time she was in the first stanza, but like us, an observer of it. And as we read the stanza, her intoxication becomes ours; we become numb as if we too have been “Drows’d with the fume of poppies.” We are entranced by the visual and sensuous abundance of this autumnal moment and watch those “last oozing hours by hours” momentarily suspended in time.

Autumn’s trance and ours is broken in the final stanza when the speaker asks, “Where are the songs of spring: Ay, where are they?” Does Keats wants us to look back to spring (and youth) or does he want us to leap forward beyond the coming winter to next year’s spring? He does not bother to wait for an answer and poignantly cautions Autumn not to think of spring and hear instead the music of her season:

   Think not of them, thou hast thy music too-- 
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
   And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
   Among the river shallows, borne aloft
      Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
   Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
   And gathering swallow twitter in the skies.

What follows is a symphony of sorrow, but also of tranquil beauty. The “wailful choir of small gnats mourn” the landscape, while sounds of the lambs, Hedge-crickets, red-breast, and swallows lighten what will be the slowly, spreading darkness of approaching winter. Here, in this closing stanza, Keats composes a music that lifts the spirit of languishing Autumn and that of the reader.

Other readers may disagree and find this in poem notes of “eternal sadness,” which makes sense, since all humans pine for that immutable youth of the mythical prelapsarian world. But in that mythical spring, nothing ripens; all remains as it is, eternally young, but forever static. In Keats’s reality, Autumn repeats its process, returns each year, swelling the earth with nature’s bounty. Even though her “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” cannot disguise the coming decay and disintegration, we still can feel in her abundance and beauty a tranquil joy. 

Late Summer Truth

      As summer begins to fall and autumn rises, the sun softens, and the green leaves mutate into brilliant yellows and reds.  Poets have often found this change from summer to autumn an inspiration for a poem.  Of course, the change of season is never really the poem’s subject, but rather a vehicle for the poet to explore the human condition.  In his poem “Blackberry Picking,” Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) recollects scenes from the final days of an August when he and others had picked the ripe blackberries.  But this August which Heaney captures is different from previous summers: it symbolizes the change from childhood to adulthood.

Late August, given heavy rain and sun

For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.

At first, just one, a glossy purple clot

Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.

You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet

Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it

Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for

Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger

Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots

Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.

Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills

We trekked and picked until the cans were full,

Until the tinkling bottom had been covered

With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned

Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered

With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard's.

We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.

But when the bath was filled we found a fur,

A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.

The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush

The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.

I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair

That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.

Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not.

     In the first stanza, the speaker describes in sensuous images the memory of picking blackberries at the end of summer.  Filled with anticipation, he watches the blackberries “ripen” for “a full week” through “heavy rain and sun,” When eating the “first one” it soaks his palate, stains his “tongue,” and arouses his “lust” for “Picking.”  This imagery conveys the physical sense of taste, but “lust,” suggests another meaning in which the vehicle of blackberry picking evokes the tenor (metaphorical meaning) of the stanza: the loss of childhood innocence to the awakening of adulthood.  And like the great poets (e.g., William Blake) before him, Heaney knows that once the fruit of “adult experience” is tasted, there is no way to restore that innocence of childhood.  Life becomes a relentless pursuit to fill “cans” and even though one can succeed in filling those “cans,” the “briars” will scratch and “Our hands” become “peppered/With thorn pricks…”  The stanza ends with the curious phrase, “our palms sticky as Bluebeard’s.”  

     Bluebeard is the French folktale of the wealthy man who married six wives and murdered each one of them.  Looking for a seventh wife, he visits a neighbor and wants to marry one of his daughters.  Bluebeard gives an elaborate banquet and afterwards the neighbor’s youngest daughter agrees to become his seventh wife.  Once back at his castle he tells her he must take a brief journey, so he gives her the keys to all the rooms in the castle.  Before he departs, he tells her she may visit all the rooms but one, which he absolutely forbids her to enter.  A short time after he is gone, she becomes increasingly curious and cannot resist the desire to visit the forbidden room.  She unlocks the door, enters and discovers the bodies of the previous wives hanging on hooks in this underground chamber. Horrified, she drops the key on the blood-soaked floor, picks it up and leaves the room.  When Bluebeard returns, she hands the keys to him, he notices blood on the forbidden room key and realizes she has entered the forbidden room.  He is just about to kill her, when her sisters and their husbands arrive and save her.  

     Now, the question is, “Why does Heaney include this allusion to Bluebeard?  The answer is twofold.  The first lies in the imagery of the second stanza.  Once the children “hoarded” the “fresh berries in the byre” a “fur” or “rat-grey fungus” gluts their “cache.”  This putrefying image accompanied with the stench of fermenting juice defiles the sweet innocence of the image of the unpicked berries.  In a sense, when children pick the fruit, they symbolically murder their own childhood purity analogous to Bluebeard murdering his innocent wives.  A second answer becomes apparent when we consider one of Heaney’s poetic methods.  Although he has written a lyrical poem, Heaney often tells or narrates a brief tale within his verse.  The speaker here is his main character who participates in the poem’s plot and discovers the inescapable truth of our inevitable decay.  But what makes this poem’s little narrative all the more interesting is the final line: “Each year I hoped they’d keep, knew they would not.”  Despite discovering the truth that innocence of youth always lapses into adulthood and decay, Heaney (and we) perennially tell ourselves tales that transform this transitory existence into an imperishable one.

Two by Donne

     When John Donne was young, he wrote some of the most extraordinarily passionate love poems in the English language (1590’s). In his great love poem, “The Canonization” Donne argues with a friend and attempts to rebut the criticisms his companion has made regarding his love affair.

               The Canonization

For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love.
   Or chide my palsy, or my gout;
My five gray hairs, or ruin'd fortune flout;
   With wealth your state, your mind with arts improve;
      Take you a course, get you a place,
      Observe his honor, or his grace;
And the king's real, or his stamped face
      Contemplate; what you will, approve,
      So you let me love.

Alas, alas, who's injur'd by my love?
   What merchant's ships have my sighs drown'd?
Who says my tears have overflowed his ground?
   When did my colds a forward spring remove?
      When did the hearts which my veins fill
      Add one more to the plaguy bill?
Soldiers find wars, and lawyer find out still
      Litigious men, which quarrel move,
      Though she and I do love.

Call us what you will, we are made such by love;
   Call her one, me another fly,
We're taper too, and at our own cost die,
   And we in us find th'eagle and the dove.
      The phoenix riddle hath more wit
      By us; we two being one are it.
So, to one neutral thing both sexes fit.
      We die and rise the same, and prove
      Mysterious by this love.

We can die by it, if not love by love,
   and if unfit for tombs or hearse
Our legends be, it will be fit for verse;
   And if no piece of chronicle we prove,
      We'll build in sonnets pretty rooms;
      As well a well-wrought urn becomes
The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs;
      And by these hymns, all shall approve
      Us canonized for love;

And thus invoke us, "You, whom reverend love
   Made one another's hermitage;
You, to whom love was peace, that now is rage,
   Who did the whole world's soul contract, and drove
      Into the glasses of your eyes
      (So made such mirrors, and such spies,
That they did all to you epitomize)
   Countries, towns, courts: beg from above
A pattern of your love.

     This poem can confuse readers because of Donne’s abrupt, argumentative start, abstract references, and intellectual complexity. The poem begins in what appears to be an argument between the speaker and a friend who has questioned the value or legitimacy of his relationship. He snaps at this “listener” and tell him to “shut up" and “let me love,” and wittily directs him to criticize his other faults—his graying hair, his poor financial circumstances. If those ideas won’t have him change the topic, he advises him to find himself a position at court, examine the king’s behavior or just think about anything else.

     If unable to persuade his listener to think about any else but his relationship, he tries to reason with him by asking whom or what his love has “injur’d”? Has his love destroyed commerce, flooded land, delay spring, or increased deaths from plague? As the stanza slides through the last three lines, the speaker concludes that their love affects neither wars nor civil litigation.

     After attempting to distract the listener, the speaker focuses on the power and quality of their love. Their sexual passion is uncontainable (symbolism of “fly”), though perhaps ephemeral (“We’re tapers too”), but they embody also pure masculinity and femininity (“th’eagle and the dove”). Their love fuses a perfect union in which their entire beings, bodies and souls, become one, and furnishes their love with a “Mysterious[ness].

     By the fourth stanza, their love morphs from the carnal to the spiritual. The story of their love may not be epic enough for a great tomb, but their “legend” (word also meant for life of a saint) will do nicely in “sonnets” and “pretty rooms.” Those sonnets become the “hymns” that will confirm the canonization of the love they shared. By this point in the poem, the speaker has left his listener behind, as he envisions future lovers petitioning these canonized saints for a pattern of their love to emulate. Though this is no easy poem to understand at first, after several rereading it should certainly impress if not astonish the reader with the way Donne incorporates such disparate elements and so radically transform the speaker’s tone from the opening aggressive line to the closing serene wording. But does Donne’s argument convince?

     Upon first encountering much of John Donne’s poetry, the reader will see that his poems can be confounding. All those allusions to religion, to the Bible; all the oblique references to mythology, legends, contemporary issues, politics, commerce etc. require much more patience than contemporary reading habits are accustomed to. Even the great 18th century critic Dr. Johnson noted that Donne’s poetry could present difficulty: “The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtlety surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought, and, though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased.” Johnson is right that our improvement is “dearly bought” by the labor exerted in understanding Donne’s poetry. But many would not agree with his judgment that readers are “seldom pleased” by reading Donne. Fortunately, not all of Donne’s poems are weighted with “heterogeneous ideas.” For instance, there is the charming “Sweetest love, I do not go”:

Sweetest love, I do not go,
   For weariness of thee,
Nor in hope the world can show
   A fitter love for me;
       But since that I 
Must die at last, 'tis best,
To use myself in jest
      Thus by feign'd deaths to die.

Yesternight the sun went hence,
   And yet is here today;
He hath no desire nor sense,
   Nor half so short a way;
      Then fear not me,
But believe that I shall make
Speedier journeys, since I take
   Moe wings and spurs than he.

Oh how feeble is man's power,
   That if good fortune fall,
Cannot add another hour,
   Nor a lost hour recall.
      But come bad chance,
And we join to it our strength,
And we teach it art and length,
   Itself o'er us to'advance.

When thou sigh'st, thou sigh'st not wind,
   But sigh'st my soul away;
When thou weep'st, unkindly kind,
   My life's blood doth decay.
      It cannot be
That thou lov'st me, as thou say'st,
If in thine my life thou wast,
   Thou art the best of me.


Let not thy divining heart
   Forethink me any ill;
Destiny may take thy part,
   And may thy fears fulfil.
      But think that we 
Are but turn'd aside to sleep;
They who one another keep
   Alive, ne'er parted be.

     In this poem, Donne wants to persuade his wife not to fear for his safe return from the journey he was about to take to France and the Low Countries with his patron Sir Robert Drury. His logic certainly could not convince the modern reader, and perhaps slightly reassured Anne who naturally would have worried given the dangers and difficulties of such a journey. Donne jests that his journey is a sort of rehearsal for the inevitability of death. He observes that the sun makes longer journeys each day, so his will be even “Speedier.” He reminds her not to add to her fear by dwelling on his absence. He urges her not to sigh or weep, since doing so makes him feel his “life’s blood” is being “decay[ed]”. Finally, he even panics a little himself and tells her that her “divining heart” might bring about the very misfortune he is trying to convince her will not occur and that she should think of their coming separation as no different from when they are “turn’d aside to sleep.” Although the couple were “parted” during his journey, Donne did return safely, and he and Anne were reunited.

     These two poems, one complex, one simple offer a glimpse into Donne’s poetry. Many of his other love poems are considerably more difficult and require a strenuous effort on behalf of a reader to attain the pleasure his verse can and does inspire. Fortunately, there are texts available with ample footnotes and helpful introductions to guide readers along on their Donnean journeys.