Nick Ripatrazone explores seasonal lines by poets Elizabeth Bishop, WB Yeats, James Merrill and Denise Levertov.
In one of her most famous poems, “At the Fishhouses”(1947), Elizabeth Bishop wrote: “Bluish, associating with their shadows, / a million Christmas trees stand / waiting for Christmas.” The lines begin with a melancholy, almost mysterious image, followed by Bishop’s curious repetition – almost a syntactic recognition that in order for the tree to serve its seasonal purpose, it must die. The lines arise from a contemplative poem, whose narrator concludes that “knowledge” is “dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free, / drawn from the cold hard mouth / of the world”.
The arresting image is the type that poets are known for: the sharp flash of nostalgia, an imperfect glimpse at life’s secrets. It was not the first time that Bishop turned to Christmas trees for meaning. In 1940, after the death of her aunt Maud Bulmer Shepherdson, Bishop attempted an elegy. Although unfinished, the poem is haunting. “Yes, you are dead now and live,” Bishop writes, “only there,” in a graveyard, “where all of your childhood’s Christmas trees are forgathered / with the present they meant to give, / and your childhood’s river quietly curls at your side / and breathes deep with each tide.” The final couplet is beautiful and bittersweet, but the preceding image is curious: there, as in her later poem, does Bishop offer something like a spirit to Christmas trees – the present they are meant to give.
Christmas trees abound in poetry – both religious and secular – because they abound in homes, both religious and secular. Tinseled and lit, they are the outdoors made indoors: a little touch of cultivated wilderness. Their paradoxes are irresistible fodder for poets.
In 1917, William Butler Yeats wrote a sequential poem titled “Upon a Dying Lady”, an elegy for Mabel Beardsley, his friend who died from cancer. The poem depicts her final days, which Yeats spent at her hospital bedside. He affirms her “old kindness” and “old distinguished grace” as she lies before them, “propped upon pillows”. She wants neither pity nor sympathy from her visitors, for her eyes “are laughter-lit”, and the conversation became a match of “our broken-hearted wit against her wit”.
In the poem’s final sequence, titled “Her Friends bring her a Christmas Tree”, the narrator addresses death itself. “Pardon, great enemy,” it begins, “We’ve carried in our tree.” They decorate it until “all the boughs are gay, / And she may look from the bed / On pretty things that may / Please a fantastic head”. The holiday gift, however meagre, is an affirmation of love. The narrator pleads with death: “Give her a little grace, / What if a laughing eye / Have looked into your face?”
Curiously enough, Yeats’s poem and its context call to mind one of the most famous Christmas tree poems, the eponymous verse from James Merrill. Written in the early weeks of 1995 and published later that year, after his death, the work was a product of his final illness. The narrator begins the poem with a lament, the recognition “That it would only be a matter of weeks / That there was nothing more to do”. His life will soon end. Despite “a primitive IV / To keep the show going”, what “lay ahead / Was clear: the stripping, the cold street, my chemicals / Plowed back into the Earth for lives to come – / No doubt a blessing, a harvest”. And yet in these waning days of the year, the room “aglow / For the last time / With candlelight, / Faces love-lit, / Gifts underfoot”. Despite all of the pain, “Still to be so poised, so / Receptive. Still to recall, to praise”.
Christmas rightfully celebrates a glorious birth, a God-made-man – and yet in that glorious presence, absence is laid bare. Although the poem was originally published centred on the page, shaped like a tree seen head-on, that editing choice obscures the poem’s power. Langdon Hammer, Merrill’s biographer, notes that the poet’s original vision was different. He intended the poem to be primarily justified left on the page, with several lines indented at the bottom, so that the poem was “in the shape of a Christmas tree, seen from another room that partially blocks the view”. Sometimes we are in the other room – distant, and despairing –and yet the light, however askew, can still be seen.
One of the gifts of Christmas is the sacred nature of ubiquity – how we might bemoan the commercialisation of the holiday, but perhaps it is divine mystery at work in bringing the spirit into unlikely spaces. Instead, let us be guided by awe, as the narrator of Denise Levertov’s poem, “A Straw Swan Under the Christmas Tree”. Although “one had never seen a swan / and strands of silver, caught / in the branches near it”, it is best to accept such ordinary miracles with gratitude.
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