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Christmas poetry
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I received a Christmas poem from a friend today, and it was beautiful but it didn’t rhyme.
I beg the question to call it poetry; my other poet friend David says that if it doesn’t rhyme it’s not a poem. I remember getting him upset once by commenting that a good essay is an extended poem. (I was just repeating something I had heard from a neighbor of mine.)
I recently learned that C.S. Lewis is of the same opinion as David:
“I’m sick of our Abracadabrist poets. What gives the show away is that their professed admirers give quite contradictory interpretations of the same poem. I’m prepared to believe that an unintelligible picture is really a very good horse if all its admirers tell me so; but when one says it’s a horse, and the next that its’ a ship, and the third that it’s an orange, and the fourth that it’s Mt. Everest, I give it up” (Letters to an American Lady).
Elsewhere: “I thought the poem by that woman was very good Christianity, but not a very good poem: no rhythmic vitality, no reason why the lines should end where they do, and no vocalic melody. But then I’m old fashioned. I think vers libre succeeds only in a few exceptional poems, and its prevalence has really ruined the art” (ibid.)
The interesting thing is that when I found out Lewis felt this way about free verse, I was more inclined to believe it than when only my friend David said it. I wonder why.
Either this shows that (a) I can’t think for myself; or (b) the whole question has tapped into deep dilemmas in my soul on the order of whether God plays dice with the universe; or, (c) the various “facts” we all think we know are opinions we accept based on the perceived credibility of authority. This latter, I suppose, is why writers constantly quote other writers — to say no more than what they themselves wanted to say.
May your Christmas be full of poetry, rhymed or otherwise.
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Off-key
While I haven’t articulated it, I’ve felt as C.S. Lewis did for quite some time. It’s one reason why I almost always skipped over certain “Poets” that inhabited this blog. It takes very little effort to write drivel which makes sense only to the author, does not rhyme, and whose divisions were arbitrary.
I do think there’s can be a certain amount of visual interest in divisions in the written word, but it’s no substitute for hearing good poetry.
That being said, let me repeat a verse I posted last night:
Bethlehem, Beth Lechem, “house of bread”:
Your white stones waited silent in the sun
For long years (long as people feel them run).
The Prophets wrote no more; the Rabbis read
The old words and unraveled every thread
And found your secret out: you were the one.
Yet when the Time came and the Thing was done,
They spent the night at home asleep in bed.
Oh, they could put their fingers on the pages
That told the old fox Herod it was you.
But those uncircumcised, stargazing sages
Came first, and shepherds, wet with evening dew,
Had long since been there and had all been fed
In Bethlehem, Beth Lechem, “house of bread.” - (D.T.W.)
MiM,
Yes, indeed, that is a poem. My favorite kind.
You’re right, Andree, those “it means whatever you think it means” things are not poetry.
Hebrew poetry in the Bible isn’t rhymed, so far as I can tell, but it includes rhythm of ideas. I think C.S. Lewis may have been complaining about the so-called poetry that’s mere juxtapositions of words without meaning. It becomes noise, like the piece of modern symphony “music” I once heard that lacked all discernable rhythm, melody and harmony. Real poetry–even nonsense poetry like “Jabberwocky”–includes rhythm of words or sounds or ideas.
My ninth grade English teacher spent a lot of time teaching us poetry. Mostly we looked at traditional poetry, but also some that was free verse. She said that it is more difficult to write good free verse than good rhyming, metered verse, and that to be able to do the former well, you have to get really good at the latter first. (I thought of that when I visited the Picasso museum in Spain and realized that Picasso was a very skilled artist at drawing realistic figures, before he did his cubist works.)
Too many people try to do the opposite, starting with free verse because it seems easier. I generally stick to writing rhyming, metered poetry, because the discipline of having to find words that fit the meter and rhyme forces me to choose words more carefully. I also have to toss out a lot of words that would have meant what I wanted, but don’t have the right sound. And sometimes I have to rearrange what I’m saying, and think more about it to come up with new possibilities. I’ve read that most of the process of good writing is editing out most of what you’ve written, even though it’s not bad, to leave only the best.
Yet, Lewis also understood, that viewers could differ about a piece. Sometimes it is the universality of the reaction and not its substance that is significant, as in when critics all agree that Hamlet is terrific, yet individually give widely varying reasons for why it is so terrific.
As to the necessity of rhyming, two words:
Paradise Lost
(Of course for those familiar with the Romance languages and the older Latin, rhyming is not such a big deal.)
Returning to Hamlet, I,i, here is how Shakespeare speaks of Christmas:
Some say that ever ‘gainst that season comes
Wherein our Saviour’s birth is celebrated,
This bird of dawning singeth all night long;
And then, they say, no spirit dare stir abroad,
The nights are wholesome, then no planets strike,
No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm,
So hallow’d and so gracious is the time.
I suppose poetry is whatever the culture defines it to be. As Jim Swindle says, Hebrew poetry doesn’t rhyme. It is made poetry by restating the same thought a different way.
Ps. 5:1, “Give ear to my words,O Lord, consider my meditation.
Hearken unto the voice of my cry, my King and my God; for unto thee will I pray.
Ps. 6:1 O Lord, rebuke me not in thine anger, neither chasten me in thy hot displeasure.
I don’t read Hebrew, but I understand Psalm 119 is written with each verse in every stanza starting with the same letter of the Hebrew alphabet. i.e. Verses 1-8 each start with the letter Aleph. i.e.
v. 37 My, how I love your law. It is my meditation all the day.
38 More wise than my enemies you have made me through your commandments ….. etc.
It also contrasts thoughts.
I prefer poetry that rhymes and has a rhythm. That’s why I like Kipling and Burns.
I see how that statement about Ps. 119 could be confusing (Oh, If Santa had brought a preview)
Verses 1-8 indeed start with Aleph. Verses 97-104 all start with “Mem”. I was wrong on a couple of counts above.
Sorry about that.
One of my favourite Christmas poems:
Robert Frost (1874–1963). Mountain Interval. 1920.
2. Christmas Trees
(A Christmas Circular Letter)
THE CITY had withdrawn into itself
And left at last the country to the country;
When between whirls of snow not come to lie
And whirls of foliage not yet laid, there drove
A stranger to our yard, who looked the city,
Yet did in country fashion in that there
He sat and waited till he drew us out
A-buttoning coats to ask him who he was.
He proved to be the city come again
To look for something it had left behind And could not do without and keep its Christmas.
He asked if I would sell my Christmas trees;
My woods—the young fir balsams like a place
Where houses all are churches and have spires.
I hadn’t thought of them as Christmas Trees.
I doubt if I was tempted for a moment
To sell them off their feet to go in cars
And leave the slope behind the house all bare,
Where the sun shines now no warmer than the moon.
I’d hate to have them know it if I was. Yet more I’d hate to hold my trees except
As others hold theirs or refuse for them,
Beyond the time of profitable growth,
The trial by market everything must come to.
I dallied so much with the thought of selling.
Then whether from mistaken courtesy
And fear of seeming short of speech, or whether
From hope of hearing good of what was mine,
I said, “There aren’t enough to be worth while.”
“I could soon tell how many they would cut,
You let me look them over.”
“You could look.
But don’t expect I’m going to let you have them.”
Pasture they spring in, some in clumps too close
That lop each other of boughs, but not a few Quite solitary and having equal boughs
All round and round. The latter he nodded “Yes” to,
Or paused to say beneath some lovelier one,
With a buyer’s moderation, “That would do.”
I thought so too, but wasn’t there to say so.
We climbed the pasture on the south, crossed over,
And came down on the north.
He said, “A thousand.”
“A thousand Christmas trees!—at what apiece?”
He felt some need of softening that to me:
“A thousand trees would come to thirty dollars.”
Then I was certain I had never meant
To let him have them. Never show surprise!
But thirty dollars seemed so small beside
The extent of pasture I should strip, three cents
(For that was all they figured out apiece),
Three cents so small beside the dollar friends
I should be writing to within the hour
Would pay in cities for good trees like those,
Regular vestry-trees whole Sunday Schools
Could hang enough on to pick off enough.
A thousand Christmas trees I didn’t know I had!
Worth three cents more to give away than sell,
As may be shown by a simple calculation.
Too bad I couldn’t lay one in a letter. I can’t help wishing I could send you one,
In wishing you herewith a Merry Christmas.
How about this? - two essays on poetry: just to stir things up. Certainly we don’t want to use the term “poetry” too broadly where “art” is more properly be used. I can’t help but associate Gen 1:26 though and our high calling in creation to be imitators of God - in the case of poetry, with words.
From Sir Philip Sidney’s “The Defense of Poesy, Otherwise Known as An Apology for Poetry” - “The purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.” and “. . . cometh unto you, with a tale which holdeth children from play, and old men from the chimney-corner, and, pretending no more, doth intend the winning of the mind from wickedness to virtue; even as the child is often brought to take most wholesome things, by hiding them . . .”
and Wallace Stevens’ “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words” - “It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality. It seems, in the last analysis, to have something to do with our self-preservation; and that no doubt, is why the expression of it, the sound of its words, helps us to live our lives.”