Poetry and Christmas

Like many people, I've had precious little time to fit the hobby in lately. There's so much to do (I'm off to whip up a batch of pfeffernüsse in a minute), but I did want to take a minute to ponder this intersection that's so important to me.

A holiday so steeped in history, faith, and sentiment is hard to "make new", and hard to mine for content that is genuinely interesting (to others, and even to onesself on a second reading!). There are two Christmas poems in To The Ones Who Must Be Loved, though neither is really about the holiday - one is about the effect having a child has on a new father's perspective, and the other is about how that perspective is challenged and changed when a child is seriously ill. Christmas provides a context and a vocabulary with which to comment on these views, which may be the best way to cut through the dreck that so frequently spills out of Christmas poems. And many other poems, but that's for a different day.

The classic and immediate poem that comes to mind is A Visit From Saint Nicholas (even if you don't know it by that title...), well worth a read in the original form: He was dressed all in fur, from his head to his foot / And his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot / A bundle of Toys he had flung on his back / And he looked like a peddler just opening his pack. An oldie (first appeared in 1823), this wonderful old poem has been parodied so much it's lost some of its luster, but solid narrative metrical verse, and it does have some terrific images that someone get overlooked: As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly / When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky / So up to the house-top the coursers they flew / With the sleigh full of Toys, and St. Nicholas too.

Those who sing in church are no doubt familiar with "I Heard The Bells on Christmas Day", but singing the first couple of versus omits the political context of Longfellow's poem. The whole story of the poem reeks with despair, but you don't need that whole story to understand the Civil War melancholy that set up the hopeful of the poem: Then from each black, accursed mouth / The cannon thundered in the South / And with the sound / The carols drowned / Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

I try every hear to produce a poem on the theme. Some years emerging as an exploration of faith, some years as a more secular family experience. This year, I'm informed primarily by my daughter's recent studies on the great Edgar Allen Poe. I figured if anything could keep me from wallowing in sentiment, it would be clinging to a Poe construct. I leave it to you to decided if I succeeded.

And I leave it to you to have a joyous holiday!