Welcome back to the Literary Helpdesk, and Merry Christmas.
Christmas literature, film and poetry are regrettably replete with trite tropes and maudlin sentiment. I don’t mean this as a ‘Bah humbug!’ to the great Solemnity, but rather as the lament of one who loves Christmas and its ceremonials: its music, food and drink, decorations, parties, and liturgies. I want to love Christmas stories.
Mostly, though, I just feel nauseated and patronised, or else riven with the wrong type of laughter. Christmas stories should be awe-inducing, not aww-inducing. The number that could be adequately summarised “Awww! A baby! Let’s be nice to each other!” is staggering. This may sound a very curmudgeonly take on the extant Christmas “literary” canon. Behind it there is more than my well-documented allergy to cute.
Both the mainstream religious understanding of Christmas and the secular elves-and-glitter nonsense turns on human sentiment.
Having pleasant, benevolent feelings towards all and sundry is not simply considered a result of the holidays, it is often their goal. Understood as feelings of non-aggression and wanting good things for others, “Peace on earth and good will to men”is a holiday remix of Moral Therapeutic Deism. Christmas becomes first and foremost a fable about man, obscuring the magnitude and majesty of what happened in Bethlehem on the first Christmas morn where not just humanity, but the whole created order shifted.
In these listless days of the new lockdown, it is especially important to try to connect our seasonal observances the deeper strata of the Christmas story. A holiday left in the care of the vicissitudes of human emotion would be spiritually disastrous.
(I write to you from the Tier 4 “Thou Shalt Not Leave Thy House” East of England.)
As I was dutifully not leaving the house this weekend — and even more dutifully cleaning the kitchen — I was listening to a recording of a choral concert I sang in many years ago. (My misspent youth involved a great deal of choral singing.) The centerpiece of this was Bach’s Cantata BWV 140 Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme. (“Sleepers awake, the voice calls to us!”) The words, I have recently learned, were the composition of late-16th century German poet Philipp Nicolai (see the German and English rendering side by side here), and revolve around the parables of the wise and foolish bridesmaids.
Like so many musical works for this time of year, the metaphor points both forward and back — to the Incarnation and to the Second Coming — but with one message: “Awake and throw off sleep! Your bridegroom approaches. You are to be wed, and nothing hereafter shall be the same as e’er it was.”
There is a profundity to the words, but one that I missed for years owing to my lack of German.
The lyrics that stuck with me from that concert were from quite a different composition, a simple choral work by John Rutter, which he entitles “What Sweeter Music”. The words are an adaptation of “A Christmas Carol, Sung to the King in the Presence at White-Hall” by 17th century English poet Robert Herrick, and they present almost a pastoral ode to Christmas.
Herrick is not a widely read poet, but he is adept when it comes to both the pastoral and the devotional, talents perhaps honed by his divinity education at Cambridge, for he was an Anglican priest. What I had not factored in to my conception of him when I was doing a spot of supplementary reading for this column was that, being a Cavalier poet — the king to whom he sang this carol was Charles II — he wrote scads of what we might politely call “bawdy” verse.
Don’t misunderstand: the use of pastoral imagery is majestic throughout, but many of his compositions are strongly pornographic, even by the standards of the day. (Note to gentle reader: “The Vine” is not a nature poem. At least not primarily. I was expecting a pastoral metaphor for Christ. I was, uh, mistaken.) He may be deserving of admiration for his varied and unusual themes even in this basest of genres, but some are so weirdly, unerotically pervy that they made my face bend in funny ways. We can revisit the question of what on earth was wrong with the man in the New Year. All told, the Robert Herrick online rabbithole is probably one best avoided at this festive time.
Despite Herrick’s peculiar fetishes, “A Christmas Carol” is worth consideration. (It is printed below in its entirety, and Rutter’s adaptation is linked above.) As simple in its composition as such saccharine classics as “Away in a Manger,” (I loathe that song), the imagery suggests not so much a return to Bethlehem as a restoration of Eden. Herrick writes of a sudden springtime dawn, the return of fruitfulness to a world shrouded in darkness and ice. We are wont to focus on Christmas in its relation to the eschaton: the first and second comings of Christ.
Indeed, this poem shares with Philipp Nicolai’s “Wachet Auf” the primary imperative to awaken in anticipation of Christ’s arrival. However, the return in Herrick’s carol to the image of earth as a garden brings us back to the original presence of God upon the earth. It is God’s presence that gives life to heaven and earth alike, and so December becomes the May of his kingdom through his birth, which ushers in a super-abundance of life. The idea of innocence presented in the usual imagery of Christmas is tied up with the helplessness and poverty of the Christchild.
We are not used to thinking of innocence as great fruitfulness, an overflowing of life, but this is what Herrick’s carol celebrates: Christmas as the restored bounty of nature.
The final verse of “A Christmas Carol” speaks of offering to God the noblest sacrifice of the heart, as well as the first fruits of this Christmas Maytime, “this holly, and this ivy wreath,” sanctifying liturgically the revelry of Christmas. This is not a holiday framed by sentiment or high feelings of good will, but one that renews the relationship of God and creation, and sees all times — good, difficult, and even unprecedented — sanctified and restored through the graces of the Incarnation.
In this spirit of Maytime and Spring Rites, I wish you a very blessed Christmas from the Literary Helpdesk.
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A Christmas Carol, Sung to the King in the Presence at White-Hall
What sweeter music can we bring, Than a carol, for to sing The birth of this our heavenly King? Awake the voice! Awake the string! Heart, ear, and eye, and everything. Awake! the while the active finger Runs division with the singer.
Dark and dull night, fly hence away, And give the honor to this day, That sees December turned to May.
If we may ask the reason, say The why, and wherefore, all things here Seem like the springtime of the year?
Why does the chilling Winter’s morn Smile, like a field beset with corn? Or smell, like to a mead new-shorn, Thus, on the sudden?
Come and see The cause, why things thus fragrant be: ‘Tis He is born, whose quickening birth Gives life and luster, public mirth, To heaven, and the under-earth.
We see Him come, and know Him ours, Who, with His sunshine, and His showers, Turns all the patient ground to flowers.
The darling of the world is come, And fit it is, we find a room To welcome Him. The nobler part Of all the house here, is the heart,
Which we will give Him; and bequeath This holly, and this ivy wreath, To do Him honor; who’s our King, And Lord of all this reveling.
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