Autoren-Bilder

David Stanford Burr

Autor von The Poet's Notebook

7 Werke 138 Mitglieder 1 Rezension

Über den Autor

Werke von David Stanford Burr

The Poet's Notebook (2000) 44 Exemplare
Poems of Fun and Fancy (2002) 36 Exemplare
Poems of the American Spirit (2002) — Herausgeber — 26 Exemplare
Poems of Vision and Prophecy (2002) 17 Exemplare
Christmas Poems (2002) 9 Exemplare
Ledger Domain (2019) 1 Exemplar

Getagged

Wissenswertes

Geburtstag
20th century
Geschlecht
male

Mitglieder

Rezensionen

12 Books of Christmas

#2 Oldies

We have a bookshelf that we get out only once a year – filled with books for and about Christmas, along with classics old LP records and a stack of CDs. From these this year, I’m selected twelve books to review: The Twelve Books of Christmas. These are not necessarily our favorites, or the best, but representative.

Four of our favorites I have already reviewed: Tascha Tudor’s illustrations for Clement Moore’s Night Before Christmas; Joseph Brodsky’s Nativity Poems; a pop-up Christmas Alphabet; and In Search of the Birth of Jesus: The Real Journey of the Magi, an account of the author’s modern-day travels along the hypothesized path of the original, by Paul William Rogers. All of these reward reading and rereading time and time again.

Many of our family favorites are too familiar to require reviews; e.g., How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, Tudor’s Take Joy!, Tolkien’s Father Christmas Letters, The Polar Express, Maurice Sendak’s Nutcracker, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, and Washington Irving’s Old Christmas. All of these are worth another look.

Every year we enjoy these books once again. Some we re-read. Some we simply admire the art work. Just holding some in our hands brings back memories of children scrambling in our lap or hanging over our shoulders. Some, of course, are just for browsing. A few years ago I picked up a little book of Christmas Poems in Barnes & Noble (ed. David Sanford Burr, 2002). I realized that we didn’t have such a book in our library, so I purchased it and brought it home, promptly shelving it with hardly a glimpse at its contents.

It’s one of those little B&N specials, handsize, neatly bound and printed. You know right away from the price that the material inside is beyond copyright, free for the asking -- golden oldies, if you will.. Indeed, only five of the hundred poems or so required acknowledgments. Twenty-seven, by my count, are anonymous (or some variant of that; e.g., “traditional,” “German carol,” “children’s rhyme,” etc.); at least twenty are lyrics to familiar carols, such as, “Angels We Have Heard on High,” “Away in a Manger,” “God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen.” Many are old and familiar: seven of them, indeed, have the words “Christmas Carol” as the title.

When I finally got around to scanning it, a year or so after bringing it home, I think I wondered to myself whatever made me think we needed this. The editor, it seemed, did precious little work: the poems are arranged alphabetically, juxtaposing very dissimilar ones; the foreword is one-page long and very pedestrian; no headnotes or footnotes or author bios or editorial comments. I was ready to consign it to my box destined for Friends of the Library, thankful that I hadn’t paid much for it in the first place ($6.96 less my B&N discount).

But closer examination found hidden away in its contents dozens of little treasures. What first attracted my sincere attention – and then admiration – were poems by well-known poets over four or five centuries who had written seriously about the holiday, poems that never made it into conventional anthologies. Of course, I had expected, and appreciated, the inclusion of John Milton’s “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” William Blake’s “Cradle Song,” from Songs of Innocence, some sections form Lord Tennyson’s In Memoriam (not as many as I would have liked), and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Christmas Bells.”

But then I discovered one by Samuel Taylor Coleridge that I had never heard of, though I know his work fairly well. It is one of those entitled “A Christmas Carol.” It begins simply enough:

The shepherds went their hasty way,
And found the lowly stable shed
Where the virgin mother lay:
And now they checked their eager tread,
For to the babe, that at her bosom hung
A mother’s song the virgin-mother sung.

How surprised I was that the sophisticated Coleridge honored the day with such simplicity. But my surprise quickly turned to amazement when Coleridge’s carol became an ardent anti-war poem: Mary replies to an inquisitor, “War is a ruffian, all with guilt defiled, / That from the aged father tears his child! // A murderous fiend, by fiends adored . . . .” But the little poem concludes with Mary’s calmer voice, caroling:

“I’m poor and of low estate,
The mother of the Prince of peace!
Joy rises in me, like a summer’s morn;
Peace, peace on earth; the Prince of peace is born!”

Finding this one poem alone made the little book worth more than its price for me. I headed to my two-volume biography of Coleridge to see if I could find out more about its origin.

But then there’s one by William Wordsworth, the other half of that British Romantic team. His poem, with a similar title, “The Christmas Carol,” captures and honors the ancient tradition of caroling: “The minstrels played their Christmas tune / To-night beneath my cottage eaves.” His carolers address their attention to each dweller in each house: “The greeting given, the music played, / In honor of each household name.”

Before long, I had discovered many more: for example, Sir John Suckling, “Upon Christ His Birth,” “Robert Herrick, “The Yule Log,” William Makepeace Thackeray, “The Mahogany Tree,” Ellizabeth Barrett Browning, “The Holy Night,” William Morris, “French Noël,” Thomas Hardy, “A Christmas Ghost-Story,” and John Donne, “Nativity,” the last one exceptionally effective.

But perhaps the most moving one of all – I cannot believe it is just now coming to my attention – is “The Nativity” by Henry Vaughan. Vaughan lived and wrote in the seventeenth century, but his poem could just as well be written today, in 2010. It begins,

Peace? and to all the world? sure, one
And he the prince of peace, hath none.
He travels to be born, and then
Is born to travel more agen.

It concludes with the visit of the “Eastern kings,” and then with this petition. Let us repeat it as our prayer today:

Lord! grant some Light to us, that we
May with them find the way to thee.
Behold what mists eclipse [this] day:
How dark it is! shed down one Ray
To guide us out of this sad night,
And say,once more, Let there be Light.

Once I discovered these, I found, nestled among them, many others by less well known, or unknown, poets. A few, of course, are sentimental and somewhat trite, but it is a pleasure to see the day celebrated in such a variety of verses from so many eras in the past -- golden oldies, indeed..

Of course, I wish for more representatives from the twentieth century. I must admit, I was more than a little surprised, and delighted, to find T.S. Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi.” This, from the architect of poetic modernism, is hardly the cheerful, traditional poem one might expect from the title. Robert Frost is represented by what is called “A Christmas Circular Letter,” entitled “Christmas Trees,” a modern and caustic narrative, presumably autobiographical. Sara Teasdale also has her “Christmas Carol,” beginning

The kings they came from out the south,
All dressed in ermine fine;
They bore him gold and chrysoprase,
And gifts of precious wine.

Paul Laurence Dunbar has another one of those entitled, “Christmas Carol,” (“Sing, earthlings, sing! / Tonight a king . . . .”), but Langston Hughes represents the Harlem Renaissance with dignity and elegance, in “Carol of the Brown King”:

Three Wise Men,
One dark like me –
Part of His
Nativity.

Of course, the variety of poems in the collection is considerable, from the children’s rhyme, “Christmas is a-coming, the goose is getting fat . . .” to “Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” from Ben Jonson to G. K. Chesterton to Ogden Nash, from John Clare’s quaint, seven-age “December” from his Shepherd’s Calendar to twelve lines “To the Children” from Heinrich Hoffman’s Strewwelpeter, from Theodosia’s seriocomic “Shepherd Who Stayed” (who watched the sheep while the others went off to Bethlehem, to Sir Walter Scott’s “Old Christmastide,” which sees the connection between pagans’ celebration of the winter solstice and the Christian gambols and ale.

And, of course, no collection from Christmas would be complete without poems just for children, like for instance, Marchette Chute’s “Presents”:

I wanted a rifle for Christmas,
I wanted a bat and a ball,
I wanted some skates and a bicycle,
But I didn’t want mittens at all.

Well, you can guess where that one’s headed.

And then there’s the amiable, anonymous query, “For the Children, or the Grown-Ups?”

‘Tis the week before Christmas and every night
As soon as the children are snuggled up tight
And have sleepily murmured their wishes and prayers,
Such fun as goes on in the parlour downstairs!

But Christmas is not always celebrated in cottages strewn with holly or mansions where mistletoe hangs. There’s Douglas Sladen’s “Christmas Letter from Australia,” (“The Fahrenheit here registers a hundred in the shade”); there’s Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Christmas at Sea” (“The wind was a nor’wester, blowing squally off the sea”); and, of course, there is Phillips Brooks’ “Christmas Everywhere” (“Christmas in the lands of palm-tree and vine”), reminding us, alas, that sometimes it’s Christmas “where peace, like a dove in his flight, / Broods o’er brave men in the thick of the fight.”

There are many poems of Christmas, and many Christmases experienced in poetry. Enjoy!
… (mehr)
½
 
Gekennzeichnet
bfrank | Dec 23, 2010 |

Statistikseite

Werke
7
Mitglieder
138
Beliebtheit
#148,171
Bewertung
½ 3.7
Rezensionen
1
ISBNs
8

Diagramme & Grafiken