9 December 2024

Mild Monday - Two Christmas poems

It’s so hard to choose which Christmas songs from my playlist to share. I love that one! And that one! And that one would be really good! Or maybe that one?

But in keeping with the original spirit of Mild Mondays, I’m going to pick two songs that started out as Victorian Era poems.

The first is “In the Bleak Midwinter” by Christina Rossetti. Born in 1830, she was the younger sister of the Pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Their parents were Italian refugees in London, but they had close family ties to the Romantic poets.

Christina was her brother’s model for Mary for the Annunciation painting Ecce Ancilla Domini! (Latin: “Behold the handmaiden of the Lord!”). Source: Wikipedia

Christina really came into the spotlight when her collection Goblin Market and Other Poems was published in 1862, and she was considered “the natural successor to Elizabeth Barrett Browning.” Throughout her life, she suffered from bouts of depression and poor health (including breast cancer), but she lived to the age of 64. She never married.

“In the Bleak Midwinter” was first published as “A Christmas Carol” in 1872, and has been set to music multiple times, including by Gustav Holst. My favorite song version is performed on the album A Winter’s Solstice III by Pierce Pettic (who omits the third stanza and alters the words slightly to fit the tune).

In the Bleak Midwinter

In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made 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 a lamb;
If I were a Wise Man, I would do my part;
Yet what I can I give Him: give my heart.

The second poem is not really about Christmas, but it takes place on Christmas Day: “Christmas at Sea” by Robert Louis Stevenson. Stevenson was born in Edinburgh in 1850, into a family of civil engineers whose focus was the design of lighthouses. He was often in ill health from childhood on, and was assumed to have tuberculosis (then called ‘consumption’). Although he started studying engineering, he came to the conclusion that writing—which he had been doing enthusiastically since childhood—was the career he preferred. He agree (to soothe his parents) to study law, and he passed the bar, but never practiced.

Instead, he spent the rest of his life—which was not long, considering how much he accomplished in it—traveling the world, writing, and associating with other writers. He wrote most of his famous novels (Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde) while laid up in ill health in his mid-30s. He and his wife (a divorced American woman who was a magazine writer) eventually settled in Samoa, where he died suddenly of a stroke at age 44, in 1894.

“Christmas at Sea,” written in 1888, is partly an adventure story, but partly a reflection on the grief of abandoning home and parents for the sake of adventure—something he surely felt keenly as an only child. The musical setting (below) is by Meg Davis, from her album My Winter Rose. She omits the first four stanzas of the poem.

Christmas at Sea

The sheets were frozen hard, and they cut the naked hand;
The decks were like a slide, where a seaman scarce could stand;
The wind was a nor’wester, blowing squally off the sea;
And cliffs and spouting breakers were the only things a-lee.

They heard the surf a-roaring before the break of day;
But ’twas only with the peep of light we saw how ill we lay.
We tumbled every hand on deck instanter, with a shout,
And we gave her the maintops’l, and stood by to go about.

All day we tacked and tacked between the South Head and the North;
All day we hauled the frozen sheets, and got no further forth;
All day as cold as charity, in bitter pain and dread,
For very life and nature we tacked from head to head.

We gave the South a wider berth, for there the tide race roared;
But every tack we made we brought the North Head close aboard:
So’s we saw the cliffs and houses, and the breakers running high,
And the coastguard in his garden, with his glass against his eye.

The frost was on the village roofs as white as ocean foam;
The good red fires were burning bright in every ’long-shore home;
The windows sparkled clear, and the chimneys volleyed out;
And I vow we sniffed the victuals as the vessel went about.

The bells upon the church were rung with a mighty jovial cheer;
For it’s just that I should tell you how (of all days in the year)
This day of our adversity was blessed Christmas morn,
And the house above the coastguard’s was the house where I was born.

O well I saw the pleasant room, the pleasant faces there,
My mother’s silver spectacles, my father’s silver hair;
And well I saw the firelight, like a flight of homely elves,
Go dancing round the china plates that stand upon the shelves.

And well I knew the talk they had, the talk that was of me,
Of the shadow on the household and the son that went to sea;
And O the wicked fool I seemed, in every kind of way,
To be here and hauling frozen ropes on blessed Christmas Day.

They lit the high sea-light, and the dark began to fall.
‘All hands to loose top gallant sails,’ I heard the captain call.
‘By the Lord, she’ll never stand it,’ our first mate, Jackson, cried.
. . . ‘It’s the one way or the other, Mr. Jackson,’ he replied.

She staggered to her bearings, but the sails were new and good,
And the ship smelt up to windward just as though she understood.
As the winter’s day was ending, in the entry of the night,
We cleared the weary headland, and passed below the light.

And they heaved a mighty breath, every soul on board but me,
As they saw her nose again pointing handsome out to sea;
But all that I could think of, in the darkness and the cold,
Was just that I was leaving home and my folks were growing old.

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Thoughts?