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 I
don’t suppose it will surprise many of you when I tell you that
our topic this week is Christmas!
Although political
correctness might suggest ‘The Holidays’.
You will
have noticed that, generally speaking, political correctness is
not high on the list for poets, and this column is no different.
So have a Merry Christmas! And a Happy New Year too!
Not that a spot of
Bah Humbugging is amiss, and we will get to that later.
Historically, most
societies have had some kind of party at the Winter Solstice.
The winter solstice in the Northern Hemisphere is the moment when
sun’s apparent path is the furthest south from the equator. This
occurs on December 21st or 22nd; and it corresponds to the shortest
day and longest night; I lived my early life fairly far to the
north, and the shortness of the days (coupled usually with lousy
weather) was really depressing. We all really needed a party!
Our first
poem chooses itself, of course. It is A
Visit from St. Nicholas, by Clement Clarke Moore (1779
– 1863). Moore was born in New York, the son of an Episcopal clergyman
who was loyal to Great Britain during the revolution but nevertheless
became a bishop and president of Columbia College. Clement Moore
was educated at home in his early youth and graduated first in
his class from Columbia in 1798. He became a well-known and respected
scholar and, typical for an educated person of his period, Moore's
publications related to a wide variety of topics such as religion,
languages, politics, and poetry. He wrote the St. Nicholas poem
for his six children in 1822, when he was Professor of Oriental
and Greek Literature, as well as Divinity and Biblical Learning,
at the General Theological Seminary of the Protestant Episcopal
Church.
 He
had no wish to publish it, but it was sent by one of his relatives
without his knowledge to the Troy Sentinel, where it appeared
anonymously a year later. Although the poem was an instant success,
Moore did not acknowledge its authorship until he was sixty-five,
in 1844, when he included it in a small book of his poetry entitled
Poems, which he published at the request of his children.
But did he write it?
Don Foster, an English professor at Vassar College and a scholar
of authorial attribution, accuses Moore of committing literary
fraud. In a recent book, Author Unknown, (Henry Holt &
Company; 2000) Mr. Foster argues that it closely matches the views
and verse of Henry Livingston Jr., a gentleman-poet of Dutch descent.
Livingston, who lived in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., died before Moore
was ever named as the poem's author. Livingston's family first
noticed the poem's growing popularity two decades later and has
insisted ever since that Livingston wrote it. But without physical
evidence these claims came to naught. Mary Van Deusen, Livingston's
seventh-generation descendant and an amateur genealogist, sought
Mr. Foster's help. Essentially, Foster compares word usage with
Moore’s other publications, and concludes that he could not have
written the poem. Equally, by the same analysis of Livingston’s
work, he believes that he was indeed the true author.
Ah, well.
The poem itself is
drawn from a German/Dutch tradition, the principle in which was
not exactly a ‘jolly’ character. The distinction between ‘good’
children, who were rewarded, and ‘bad’ children, who were punished,
was very real in the original; here are the last two stanzas of
another poem from about the same time, which again begins with
the (modest) gifts left for the good children:
But where I found
the children naughty,
In manners rude, in temper haughty,
Thankless to parents, liars, swearers,
Boxers, or cheats, or base tale-bearers,
I left a long, black,
birchen rod,
Such as the dread command of God
Directs a Parent’s hand to use
When virtue’s path his sons refuse.
The image presented
of St. Nicholas in the poem is of a very small entity: the reindeer
are also described as very small. Actually, a reindeer is not
a particularly large animal, anyway! His clothing is also generally
described as dirty from the soot in the chimneys. Not much like
the character in your local mall!
Our second poem is
a quite different take on Christmas: The
Mistletoe Bough, by Thomas Haynes Bayly (1797 – 1839).
Bayly was very popular in his day as a lyric poet and playwright.
I had some difficulty in finding biographical details for him,
but I have a book I find really entertaining whose editor found
a lot more information than I did. The book is Parlour
Poetry: A Casquet of Gems, edited by Michael R. Turner, and
I recommend it to all of you. Turner tells us that Bayly was born
in the city of Bath, in south-west England, and was extremely
well-connected. “He wrote plays from the age of seven, and produced
a weekly paper at school in Winchester. Having flirted with the
law and the church, he found his true avocations to lie with amateur
theatricals and lyric poetry. The considerable proceeds from his
literary labors (and his wife’s dowry) enabled him to lead a pleasant
social life, diversified by the composition of ballads, works
of fiction, and plays which were popular on the professional stage
and also in august private circles. He succumbed to brain-fever,
dropsy, and jaundice, a sad conclusion to the career of a poet
who repeated on sundry occasions his ambition to be a butterfly.”
In the time that has
elapsed since these two poems, the general character of Christmas
has changed a great deal, and particularly in the United States.
Ogden Nash (1902 – 1971) had some observations: here are a some
verses from A Carol for Children:
God rest you, merry
Innocents,
Let nothing you dismay,
Let nothing wound an eager heart
Upon this Christmas day.
Soon, soon enough
come crueler gifts,
The anger and the tears;
Between you now there sparsely drifts
A handful yet of years.
The ancient altars
smoke afresh,
The ancient idols stir;
Faint in the reek of burning flesh
Sink frankincense and myrrh.
Gaspar, Balthazar,
Melchior!
Where are your offerings now?
What greetings to the Prince of War,
His darkly branded brow?
Two ultimate laws
alone we know,
The ledger and the sword –
So far away, so long ago,
We lost the infant Lord.
Only the children
clasp his hand;
His voice speaks low to them,
And still for them the shining band
Wings over Bethlehem.
God rest you, merry
Innocents,
While innocence endures,
A sweeter Christmas than we to ours
May you bequeath to yours.
In more characteristic
tones he bewails the passing of the traditional Christmas card
in Epstein, Spare That Yule Log. Here is the last verse:
Oh, give me an old-fashioned
Christmas card,
With hostlers hostling in an old inn yard,
With church bells chiming their silver notes,
And jolly red squires in their jolly red coats,
And a good fat goose by the fire that dangles,
And a few more angels and a few less angles.
Turn backward, Time, to please this bard,
And give me an old-fashioned Christmas card.
 Dorothy
Parker (1893 – 1967) also had a go in Christmas 1921. I shan’t
quote the whole poem but the first stanza ends:
I do not ask for
presents rare –
Dearest, I know that I wouldn’t get them.
The last stanza talks
about what she would like instead – but it ends (as usual) with
a sting: here are the last few lines
Give me your hopes
for the unborn year,
Fill up my heart with a secret treasure.
Give me the things you long to say,
All of your tenderest dreams unfetter.
Give me your love, on this Christmas Day –
But come across, please, when times get better.
My last poem for this
week is from John Betjeman (1906 – 1984). He was born in north
London (his father was a prosperous businessman), and attended
Marlborough School (where T. S. Eliot was one of his teachers)
and then went to Magdalen College, Oxford. He was known for his
nostalgia for the recent past and a precise rendering of social
nuance; he was very popular in England. His book, Collected Poems,
which appeared in 1958, sold over 100,000 copies in the first
edition. He was one of the founders of the British Victorian Society.
His voice is that of the upper middle class (as one says in England)
and the rise of the intellectual Working Class after the Second
World War gradually eroded his popularity with the poetry community:
I commented about that in an earlier article in this series. He
was knighted in 1969, and in 1972 he succeeded Cecil Day-Lewis
(1904 – 1972) as Poet Laureate. His poem Christmas is a
subtle commentary on the superficialities of Christmas and the
importance of the underlying religious event which is its basis.
I hope you have a
good, (as well as a merry!) Christmas. The winter solstice to
all of humanity is a rebirth from the dying and decay of the old
year’s winter, and the promise of a new awakening; so we can wish
all of our friends (and all of our enemies!) a Happy New Year,
and together look forward to Spring.
I’ll talk
to you all again in 2004.
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