Friday – Christmas
John Heath-Stubbs’s “On the Nativity” is an exquisite Christmas poem, capturing all the paradoxes we associate with the occasion but with arresting new images. “Infinite Godhead” has entered the world, yet it “circumscribed hangs helpless at the breast.” A “strange Star has fallen, to blossom from a tomb.” “Material kind Earth” receives divinity, “yet out in the cold he lies.”
I love the setting described by the poet: the “cold airs are musical, and all the ways of the sky/ Vivid with moving fires.” Heath-Stubbs may be echoing Blake’s “Jerusalem” when he writes of “the hills where tread/ The feet—how beautiful!—of them that publish peace.”
Merry Christmas.
Shepherds, I sing you this winter’s night
Our Hope new-planted, the womb’d, the buried Seed:
For a strange Star has fallen, to blossom from a tomb,
And infinite Godhead circumscribed hangs helpless at the breast.Now the cold airs are musical, and all the ways of the sky
Vivid with moving fires, above the hills where tread
The feet—how beautiful!—of them that publish peace.The sacrifice, which is not made for them,
The angels comprehend, and bend to earth
Their worshipping way. Material kind Earth
Gives Him a Mother’s breast, and needful food.A Love, shepherds, most poor,
And yet most royal, kings,
Begins this winter’s night;
But oh, cast forth, and with no proper place,
Out in the cold He lies!