1856-60 Blogging, Part 3 of 5 Christina Rossetti's Goblins
In these long breaks between the signature 21 Essays series, I’m experimenting
with a new feature focused on possibilities for future series. I’ll spin
the roulette wheel to pick a year (or set of years) and then brainstorm on some
potential essay topics. This time the wheel spins, gradually slows,
then clicks to a stop, pointing at: 1856-1860.
So here’s an 1859 series possibility: 21 essays
on “Goblin Market,” a poem by Christina Rossetti.
Backwards up the mossy glen
Turn’d and troop’d the goblin men,
With their shrill repeated cry,
“Come buy, come buy.”
Christina Rossetti’s intense narrative poem “Goblin Market” is a recent discovery for me. I read it in preparation for my series on Christina Rossetti’s “In the Bleak Midwinter.”
Much as I loved “Goblin Market,” it didn’t provide much grist for the
“Midwinter” series which leaned more toward pleasant Nativity thoughts than images of
evil goblin merchants and their seductive and juicy fruits.
If “In the Bleak Midwinter” was appropriate for Christmas,
“Goblin Market” might be a good choice for Halloween. In a cultural scene overcrowded with zombies
and vampires, it might be nice to acknowledge the too-often-overlooked goblins.
One had a cat’s face,
One whisk’d a tail,
One tramp’d at a rat’s pace,
One crawl’d like a snail,
One like a wombat prowl’d obtuse
and furry,
One like a ratel tumbled hurry
skurry.
Over the next two days, I’ll be proposing some more 1856-60 ideas (with no promises that I’ll necessarily be getting to any of them…). But I’m wide open to other suggestions. Any ideas for 1856-60 books, short
stories, poems, paintings, songs, or other cultural artifacts that might inspire a good 21 Essays series?
Midwinter-blogging,
essay 12 of 12 blog entries on
“In the Bleak
Midwinter,” a poem by Christina Rossetti
The King's College Choir sings "In the Bleak Midwinter" in
King's College Chapel, Cambridge, England.
A Deeply Moving Song
I think it would be a mistake to entirely
neglect a mention of the musical settings in this midwinter blogging
series. When I first began research on “In the Bleak Midwinter,” I knew and loved the song
through its Gustav Holst setting. Therefore, I
was delighted to discover that “In the Bleak Midwinter” had been named “Best
Carol of All Time” by a 2008 BBC music magazine poll of choirmasters and other
choral experts. However, looking into the matter a bit further, I found
that it was a Harold Darke setting—and not the Holst I knew and loved—that
achieved this acclaim. Up to that point, I hadn’t even heard the Darke music.
The results of the BBC poll still strike me as odd but I’m
willing to accept this is what you get when you poll people in the choral
business rather than the general public. The songs they chose are lovely,
even if rather unfamiliar:
1. In the Bleak Midwinter
2. In Dulci Jubilo
3. A Spotless Rose
4. Bethlehem Down
5. Lully, Lulla
6. Tomorrow Shall be My Dancing Day
7. There is No Rose
8. O Come All Ye Faithful
9. Of the Father's Heart Begotten
10. What Sweeter Music
I like the appreciation that Jeremy Pound, deputy editor of BBC Music Magazine, issued in defense of
their #1 pick on the Christmas hit parade: “While some of the carols
nominated may seem unfamiliar, does any other song get to the very heart of
Christmas as understatedly but effectively as ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’?”
Furthermore, Pound said that “In the Bleak Midwinter” was “nigh-on perfect as a
carol text… There’s the winter cold, the coming of Christ, the
description of the nativity scene and, finally, that ‘What shall I give him?’
moment of self-reflection. And then there’s the music.”
The Holst setting was composed at the request of his friend
Ralph Vaughan Williams for the 1906 Anglican Hymnal. It was written as a
simple hymn, not a choral arrangement, and the melody received the name
“Cranham” for the town Cranham, Gloucestershire where it was written.
The original Harold Darke setting was conceived as a choral
arrangement with organ accompaniment and tenor and soprano solos. Darke
composed it in 1909, a few years after Holst contributed his version to the
hymnal. Thanks to seasonal broadcasts of the King’s College Choir singing
“In the Bleak Midwinter,” this arrangement has become very well known in England.
In the United States,
it remains much less familiar.
Kate McGarrigle performing
"In the Bleak Midwinter."
I think both versions are great and it’s been a real
pleasure compiling great performances of both arrangements on the Music Room
sections of this blog.
Today’s closing selection is particularly moving.
Brother and sister Rufus and Martha Wainwright sing the Darke setting of “In the Bleak Midwinter,”
accompanied by their mother Kate McGarrigle in her last public performance at
the Royal Albert Hall. She died six weeks later of sarcoma. It’s
beautiful to see this very talented family performing together, expressing their
love for each other
through the words and music of “In the Bleak Midwinter.”
Rufus Wainwright, Martha Wainwright, and Kate McGarrigle.
The Music Room
Rufus Wainwright, Martha Wainwright, and Kate McGarrigle
sing “In the Bleak Midwinter”…
Reference Sources
Poems of Christina
Rossetti, edited by William M. Rossetti
Selected Poems of
Christina Rossetti, edited by Marya Zaturenska
Christina Rossetti: A
Writer’s Life by Jan Marsh
The Achievement of
Christina Rossetti, edited by David A. Kent
Christina Rossetti
(Bloom’s Major Poets), edited by Harold Bloom
Christina Rossetti’s
Faithful Imagination by Dinah Roe
Christina Rossetti:
Faith, Gender and Time by Diane D’Amico
Genius by Harold
Bloom
The Man Who Invented
Christmas by Les Standiford
The Pre-Raphaelites
by Andrea Rose
Victorian Painting
by Christopher Wood
... and an occasional sneak glance at Wikipedia entries (but
always double-checking everything!)
Midwinter-blogging,
essay 11 of 12 blog entries on
“In the Bleak
Midwinter,” a poem by Christina Rossetti
Rossetti’s Other
Christmas Poems
Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, and their
famous Christmas tree.
Our modern Christmas was being born while Christina Rossetti
(1830-1894) was growing up. She was ten
when Charles Dickens published A
Christmas Carol and 18 when a woodcut of Queen Victoria and Prince
Albert’s Christmas tree went the Victorian version of viral—swiftly popularizing
the Christmas tree throughout England and the States. These two events
were key in shaping the Christmas that we know and celebrate today. The
idea of Christmas as a family-centered holiday, complete with opportunities for
organized gift-giving, began to take firm hold upon the public imagination.
The Rossetti family appears to have always enjoyed
Christmas, mainly welcoming the occasion as a time for a quiet family
reunion. Rossetti’s Christmas poetry displays a genuine fondness for the
holiday, even apart from its religious importance. Around the same time
she wrote “In the Bleak Midwinter,” she also wrote this charming little
untitled verse:
Common Holly hears a berry
To make Christmas Robins merry: —
Golden Holly bears a rose,
Unfolding at October’s close
To cheer an old Friend’s eyes and
nose.
Admittedly, Rossetti’s voluminous writings cover many
Biblical topics, with the Christmas poetry only accounting for a relatively
small percentage of the total. In all, there are approximately 30 poems which
feature strong Advent or Christmas themes. Most are forgotten today, but
two of them broke from the pack to become seasonal favorites. Obviously
one of these is our primary subject, “In the Bleak Midwinter.” The other is
“Love Came Down At Christmas,” first published without a title in Rossetti’s
book Time Flies: A Reading Diary
(1885) and later anthologized with the title “Christmastide” in 1893.
“Christmastide”
Love came down at Christmas,
Love all lovely, Love Divine;
Love was born at Christmas,
Star and Angels gave the sign.
Worship we the Godhead,
Love Incarnate, Love Divine;
Worship we our Jesus:
But wherewith for sacred sign?
Love shall be our token,
Love be yours and love be mine,
Love to God and all men,
Love for plea and gift and sign.
Sometime in the two decades following Rossetti’s death,
someone set “Christmastide” to the Irish melody called “Gartan” and it made it
into an alternative edition of the Episcopal Church’s hymnal, edited by the
Rev. Dr. Charles Hutchins, in 1920. While never achieving the wide
popularity of its cousin “In the Bleak Midwinter,” it’s retained a secure place
in hymnals for nearly a century.
Here’s one final favorite of mine, which showcases
Rossetti’s enthusiasm for paradoxes. “In the Bleak Midwinter” plays with the
traditional Christian paradox of an infinite God present in a tiny baby.
Rossetti’s “Christmas Eve” finds a whole new set of paradoxes in the holiday:
“Christmas Eve”
CHRISTMAS hath darkness
Brighter than the blazing noon,
Christmas hath a chillness
Warmer than the heat of June,
Christmas hath a beauty
Lovelier than the world can show:
For Christmas bringeth Jesus,
Brought for us so low.
Earth, strike up your music,
Birds that sing and bells that ring;
Heaven hath answering music
For all Angels soon to sing:
Earth, put on your whitest
Bridal robe of spotless snow:
For Christmas bringeth Jesus,
Brought for us so low.
“Saint Columba Altarpiece,” central panel, circa 1455,
by
Rogier van der Weyden, from the Alte Pinakothek, Munich, Germany.
Source: Wikimedia Commons
The Music Room
Tine Thing Helseth plays an instrumental version of “In the Bleak Midwinter”…
... and Jars of Clay perform
“Love Came Down at Christmas.”
Reference Sources
Poems of Christina
Rossetti, edited by William M. Rossetti
Selected Poems of
Christina Rossetti, edited by Marya Zaturenska
Christina Rossetti: A
Writer’s Life by Jan Marsh
The Achievement of
Christina Rossetti, edited by David A. Kent
Christina Rossetti
(Bloom’s Major Poets), edited by Harold Bloom
Christina Rossetti’s
Faithful Imagination by Dinah Roe
Christina Rossetti:
Faith, Gender and Time by Diane D’Amico
Genius by Harold
Bloom
The Man Who Invented
Christmas by Les Standiford
The Pre-Raphaelites
by Andrea Rose
Victorian Painting
by Christopher Wood
... and an occasional sneak glance at Wikipedia entries (but
always double-checking everything!)
Midwinter-blogging,
essay 10 of 12 blog entries on
“In the Bleak
Midwinter,” a poem by Christina Rossetti
Off to America
Christina Rossetti portrait by
Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
The American literary journal Scribner’s Monthly requested a Christmas poem from Christina
Rossetti in 1872. She sent them “In the Bleak Midwinter.” As she
tended to offer already-written poems when fielding requests like this, it’s
difficult to determine when the poem was written.
The publication of the poem was a decidedly minor event in
Rossetti’s life. It didn’t pay much and didn’t receive much notice after
it was released into the world. Rossetti was recovering from a serious
illness at the time, rarely venturing from the house or even from
Scribner's Monthly, Dec. 1872.
her
bed. Most likely, she didn’t give much further thought to the poem after
sending it off to America.
At this point in her life, Christina Rossetti had
established a reputation for herself as one of England’s leading poetesses.
The very popular Elizabeth Barrett Browning had recently died and Rossetti was
widely considered to be her successor. But positive critical appreciation
did not go hand in hand with financial success or commercial popularity.
She had to be content with intellectual admiration in the absence of a
breakthrough work like Browning’s Sonnets
from the Portuguese, a model for a woman poet’s potential for popular
success in the Victorian era.
From both a commercial and critical standpoint, Rossetti’s
most popular poem was “Goblin Market,” published ten years earlier in
1862. “Goblin Market” tells a dark fairy tale of two sisters, one of whom
makes a deal with local goblin merchants and nearly dies from the
experience. Rossetti was a very Christian writer, frequently drawing from
her deeply held Anglican beliefs. But while “Goblin Market” can be read as a
sort of Christian moral story, its primary fascination has always resided in
its uncanny and sexualized imagery.
Title page of Goblin Market and Other Poems, designed and
illustrated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
“Goblin Market” is an altogether different type of poem from
“In the Bleak Midwinter.” As Rossetti’s reputation has ebbed and flowed
over the past 150 years, these two poems have come to represent Rossetti in the
mass culture. “Goblin Market” has remained the critical favorite,
inspiring reams of academic interpretation.
By contrast, “In the Bleak Midwinter” has received scant critical
attention, but it can boast the only Rossetti lyrics that are instantly recognized
far and wide.
Curiously, Rossetti never lived to see the outbreak of
popularity for her little poem. It only began to receive attention after
it was published in a 1904 “Collected Works” edition a decade after her death.
Rossetti knew her work was good and expected it to last. But if she returned today to google her poetry to see which poems people were
still talking about, she probably would expect to see “Goblin Market,”
“The Convent Threshold,” “Birthday,” “Remember,” and other serious poems. I imagine she’d be
surprised to see a blog dedicating 12 entries to that little poem called “In
the Bleak Midwinter” 149 years after she sent it off to a far-away publisher.
The Music Room
Dame Kiri Te Kanawa sings “In the Bleak Midwinter”…
Reference Sources
Poems of Christina
Rossetti, edited by William M. Rossetti
Selected Poems of Christina
Rossetti, edited by Marya Zaturenska
Christina Rossetti: A
Writer’s Life by Jan Marsh
The Achievement of
Christina Rossetti, edited by David A. Kent
Christina Rossetti
(Bloom’s Major Poets), edited by Harold Bloom
Christina Rossetti’s
Faithful Imagination by Dinah Roe
Christina Rossetti:
Faith, Gender and Time by Diane D’Amico
Genius by Harold
Bloom
The Man Who Invented
Christmas by Les Standiford
The Pre-Raphaelites
by Andrea Rose
Victorian Painting
by Christopher Wood
... and an occasional sneak glance at Wikipedia entries (but
always double-checking everything!)
“In the Bleak
Midwinter,” a poem by Christina Rossetti
Christina Rossetti posed as Mary: “The Girlhood of
Mary Virgin,” 1849, oil on canvas by
Dante
Gabriel Rossetti. From the collection
of
the Tate Britain, London, England.
Source: Wikimedia Commons.
Christina Rossetti's Eyes
Using minimalist strokes in her poem “In the Bleak Midwinter,” Christina Rossetti paints a
picture of Mary, the mother of Jesus. Mary is a maiden, she is
transported by bliss, she feeds her baby, and she worships with a kiss.
Christina Rossetti’s brother, the great Pre-Raphaelite
artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti, had earlier depicted Mary as a character in two
of his first paintings, Girlhood of Mary
Virgin and Ecce Ancilla Domini!.
His model for Mary was his sister Christina, aged 18 when posing for Girlhood of Mary Virgin and 20 for Ecce Ancilla Domini. The first
painting received some acclaim when first exhibited; the second was
harshly criticized in very public forums. During Christina’s life, both
paintings were well known and the subject of growing praise. They remain
classics of the Pre-Raphaelite movement.
How does it feel to be the face of Mary? Especially for
a person as devout as Christina Rossetti?
“When a young girl, at the time
that she sat for the virgin in the picture now in the National Gallery, she (Christina
Rossetti) was, as both her mother and Gabriel
have told me, really lovely, with
an
extraordinary expression of pensive sweetness.”
Mr. Watts-Dunton
The Athenaeum
January 5, 1895
Even though a beauty of personality comes through in many of
the poems, it’s hard to find that pensive sweetness in later drawings and
photographs of Rossetti. You can see that it’s the same person who posed
for the paintings but there’s a hardness to her that can intimidate even now. The mystical beauty captured in the paintings
is absent.
We sing Rossetti’s lyrics to “In the Bleak Midwinter” and
“Love Came Down at Christmas” at our church, but there’s another very notable
link to Rossetti. In one of the church hallways, there’s a print on the
wall of one of the world’s most famous paintings, William Holman Hunt’s The Light of the World. It has
been reproduced millions of times—our church is one of thousands that displays
it. In the picture, Jesus stands outside the door and knocks.
Christina Rossetti was one of Hunt’s models for the face of
Jesus. In an 1898 letter to Edward Clodd, Hunt remembered:
“As I had to have some living being
for the colour of the flesh with growth of eyebrows and eyelashes, the solemn
expression, when the face was quiescent, of Miss Rossetti promised to help me
with some shade of earnestness I aimed at getting…” *
Other models also contributed to Hunt’s vision, but it’s
generally believed that his painting of Christ’s eyes was largely inspired by
Rossetti. They may be her eyes.
Detail of "The Light
of the World."
Mary, Jesus, Christina—virgins all. At the time she
was posing, Christina would not have anticipated that she herself would remain a
maiden all her life. She did know she was going to be a poet though, and
she was confident that she had the talent to succeed. Pause to notice
Jesus’ eyes the next time you pass a reproduction of The Light of the World. They
are reverent, sensitive, and unyielding—the eyes of a smart young poet perhaps?
* Accurate transcription: Although Mr. Hunt’s grammar is a bit dodgy, his main points are understandable.
An older Christina Rossetti: Christina and Her Mother," 1877, chalk
drawing by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. From the National Portrait Gallery,
London, England.
Source: Wikimedia Commons.
The Music Room
The Indigo Girls sing “In the Bleak Midwinter”…
Reference Sources
Poems of Christina
Rossetti, edited by William M. Rossetti
Selected Poems of
Christina Rossetti, edited by Marya Zaturenska
Christina Rossetti: A
Writer’s Life by Jan Marsh
The Achievement of
Christina Rossetti, edited by David A. Kent
Christina Rossetti
(Bloom’s Major Poets), edited by Harold Bloom
Christina Rossetti’s
Faithful Imagination by Dinah Roe
Christina Rossetti:
Faith, Gender and Time by Diane D’Amico
Genius by Harold
Bloom
The Man Who Invented
Christmas by Les Standiford
The Pre-Raphaelites
by Andrea Rose
Victorian Painting
by Christopher Wood
... and an occasional sneak glance at Wikipedia entries (but
always double-checking everything!)
“In the Bleak
Midwinter,” a poem by Christina Rossetti
A fresco in Cappadocia,
Turkey, circa
12th century.
Source: Wikimedia Commons.
Three Syllables
The last line of each stanza of Christina Rossetti’s “In the
Bleak Midwinter” has three syllables, with the stresses falling on the first
and third syllables. Bump-ba-bump. Here they are:
First stanza: Long ago.
Second stanza: Jesus Christ.
Third stanza: Which adore.
Fourth stanza: With a kiss.
Fifth stanza: Give my heart.
All the other 35 lines are longer, most employing a
three-beat rhythm as well as a couple that drop to two and a couple that
stretch out to four. The last line is always terse—just three unadorned
syllables. It can be difficult to pick up on the compactness of these
lines if you have the familiar Gustav Holst melody lodged in your head.
The song lengthens each of these phrases to put them on a par with the other
lines. It’s nice, but leaves a false impression of the original.
Actually the whole poem is remarkably terse. There are
few frills. A line like “Frosty wind made moan” is marvelously compact,
as is “Earth stood hard as iron.” Rossetti has been criticized for being
too feminine in her writing—insufficiently aggressive—but that complaint seems
foreign to this poem. “Earth stood hard as iron” is lean and mean.
It gives the lie to the fool’s game of assuming gender based on style.
Most would guess the blacksmith wrote it, not the Victorian spinster.
The three kings arrive in Rozhdestvo (Christmas), a
1996 short film by Russian
animator Mikhail Aldashin.
But nothing beats the last lines of each stanza for
minimalist effect. They close each stanza abruptly, delivering a swift punch
line then falling silent. The close of the first stanza, “Long ago,” propels
us into the past (there’s nothing prior to the eighth line to indicate that the
poem is taking place long ago). The close of the third stanza, “Which
adore,” conveys the purity of the worshipping animals. The close of the
fourth stanza, “With a kiss,” promotes Mary’s worship above that of angels.
And this brings us to the most important lines of the
poem. This three-syllable line is unusual in Rossetti’s writings and in
poetry in general. It does, however, allow Rossetti to construct the
poem’s stanzas around the natural rhythm of “Jesus Christ.” Each of these
last lines duplicates that beat—the rhythm of the name Jesus Christ. The
very devout Christina Rossetti centers her poem on that rhythm.
This rhythm then closes the poem with Rossetti’s no-frills
declaration of her gift, spoken to the rhythm of Jesus Christ, “Give my
heart.” These simple last lines exalt their subjects—the barnyard
animals, Mary’s gift of a kiss, and Rossetti’s gift of her heart.
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...
That’s the buildup. Followed
by:
Give my heart.
Three syllables, leaving nothing more to be said.
“The Adoration of the Shepherds,” 1646, oil on canvas,
Here’s the fifth and final stanza of Christina Rossetti’s
“In the Bleak Midwinter.”
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.
“In the
Bleak Midwinter,” fifth stanza
Christina
Rossetti
Each of the poem’s five stanzas has eight lines. The
second and fourth lines rhyme, as do the sixth and eighth. In most cases,
each of the first seven lines receives three stresses; a few lines depart
from this structure and have four. The meter is largely driven by
trochee—the poetry term for a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed
syllable. (The trochee is the reverse of the iamb favored by
Shakespeare.)
I find it hard to read the poem without falling into the
rhythms of the popular music setting. But it’s good to remember that
these rhythms are not necessarily Rossetti’s. I think the last stanza
nicely demonstrates how the popular Gustav Holst melody alters the way we hear
the poem’s original built-in music.
Stained glass from
L'eglise Notre-Dame
de l'Assomption,
Eymet, Dordogne,
France.
In the original poem, the line “What can I give him”
receives three stresses: What, I, and him. But in the familiar
music setting, the first word “What” is drawn out into two syllables,
transforming it into a trochee. This changes the rhythm, resulting in the
stresses falling on: What, can, give (also sung as if it were two
syllables with the stress falling on the first), and him.
This isn’t to say there’s anything wrong with the music
setting. The melody is beautiful and the new stresses do no damage to
the poem’s meaning. The only difficulty is in attempting to recover a
reading of the line the way Rossetti wrote it—with the stress on the word “I.”
There’s a good reason for the stress to fall on the word
“I.” This concluding stanza takes off in a new direction from the four
that precede it. It collapses the centuries, placing the author on the
holy ground of the nativity, forcing her to confront the question: How
should I respond? It’s a personal question that requires introspection.
When Rossetti writes in the first person in her poems, she
frequently deploys a fictional narrator—the “I” is not necessarily
Rossetti. With “In the Bleak Midwinter,” you can’t tell if this is meant
to be the case. The “I” might be Rossetti or might not be.
Personally, I like to think that this really is Rossetti speaking in the first
person: that the question is, “What shall I, Christina Rossetti, give the
Christ child?”
The shepherd can give a lamb. The wise man will give
something appropriate (perhaps myrrh, frankincense, or gold if we associate
wise man with magi). Notice how both of Rossetti’s examples are
men. Now we turn to Christina Rossetti. Growing up middle class in
Victorian England, professions were largely closed off to her.
Educational opportunities were limited. She had little money of her
own. She literally had very little to give, except for the volunteer time
that she gave to serving the Anglican church and its missions and, of course,
her poetry.
The line “Give my heart” closes the poem, even as it
completes her gift of poetry to the child.
"Virgin and Angels Adoring the Christ Child," glazed earthenware,
circa 1460s-70s, by Luca Della Robbia (1400-1482). Frame attributed
to Andrea Della Robbia (1435-1525). From the collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
The Music Room
James Taylor sings “In the Bleak Midwinter”…
Reference Sources
Poems of Christina
Rossetti, edited by William M. Rossetti
Selected Poems of Christina
Rossetti, edited by Marya Zaturenska
Christina Rossetti: A
Writer’s Life by Jan Marsh
The Achievement of
Christina Rossetti, edited by David A. Kent
Christina Rossetti
(Bloom’s Major Poets), edited by Harold Bloom
Christina Rossetti’s
Faithful Imagination by Dinah Roe
Christina Rossetti:
Faith, Gender and Time by Diane D’Amico
Genius by Harold
Bloom
The Man Who Invented
Christmas by Les Standiford
The Pre-Raphaelites
by Andrea Rose
Victorian Painting
by Christopher Wood
... and an occasional sneak glance at Wikipedia entries (but
always double-checking everything!)
“In the Bleak
Midwinter,” a poem by Christina Rossetti
Angels and Archangels
Watercolor Illustration by William Blake for
John Milton's On the Morning of Christ's
Nativity.
Source: Wikimedia Commons
Angels, archangels, cherubim, and seraphim crowd the Bethlehem sky in Christina
Rossetti’s poem “In the Bleak Midwinter.”
Enough for Him, whom cherubim
Worship night and day,
A breastful of milk
And a mangerful of hay;
Enough for Him, whom angels
Fall down before,
The ox and ass and camel
Which adore.
Angels and archangels
May have gathered there,
Cherubim and seraphim
Thronged the air,
But only His mother
In her maiden bliss,
Worshipped the Beloved
With a kiss.
“In the Bleak
Midwinter,” stanzas 3-4
Christina
Rossetti
Rossetti was deeply knowledgeable about her Anglican faith
so we can trust her to tell a cherubim from a seraphim. She was also
well-read on her poetry, so she knew the literary angels of poets like George
Herbert, John Milton, and William Blake.
Since people nowadays aren’t
always up on angel lore, here are the basic distinctions:
Angels: The
umbrella term for all the spiritual beings that serve as God’s messengers.
Archangels: The
highest ranked angels.
Cherubim: Spiritual
beings with four faces (lion, ox, eagle, and man) and four wings.
Seraphim: Fiery six-winged spiritual beings that
surround God’s throne.
But even though they signal the holy presence, Rossetti’s
angels appear in just two stanzas only to be shunted aside in favor of the
terrestrial beings. The breastful of milk and the mangerful of hay rank higher
in importance than the worship of angels. Mary’s kiss is valued more
highly, too. And in my favorite comparison, the baby is content with the
ox, the ass, and the camel; the angels are present but they don’t
provide the contentment of the beasts.
Throughout Christian history, there have been debates about
the position of angels and humans in the universal hierarchy. Are humans
higher than angels or is it vice versa? Or
are angels separate from the hierarchy, so ethereal in their nature that an
infinite number can dance upon the head of a pin?
The eighth psalm places man “a little lower than angels,”
but some Christian theologians suggest that the incarnation of Jesus as man may
have exalted man’s status above the angels. After all, Paul wrote in his
first letter to the Corinthians, “Know ye not that we shall judge angels?”
Rossetti seems prepared to begin judging the angels
now. She approves their presence as they crowd around the nativity, but
casts her lot with the ox, the ass, and the camel.
The Music Room
Isabel Suckling, known as the Choirgirl, sings “In the Bleak
Midwinter” Up until this point, all the performers in our Midwinter Music Room have sung the Gustav Holst arrangement. Isabel sings the equally beautiful Harold Darke arrangement.
Reference Sources
Poems of Christina
Rossetti, edited by William M. Rossetti
Selected Poems of
Christina Rossetti, edited by Marya Zaturenska
Christina Rossetti: A
Writer’s Life by Jan Marsh
The Achievement of
Christina Rossetti, edited by David A. Kent
Christina Rossetti
(Bloom’s Major Poets), edited by Harold Bloom
Christina Rossetti’s Faithful
Imagination by Dinah Roe
Christina Rossetti:
Faith, Gender and Time by Diane D’Amico
Genius by Harold
Bloom
The Man Who Invented
Christmas by Les Standiford
The Pre-Raphaelites
by Andrea Rose
Victorian Painting
by Christopher Wood
... and an occasional sneak glance at Wikipedia entries (but
always double-checking everything!)
“In the Bleak
Midwinter,” a poem by Christina Rossetti
The Paradoxes
Mosaic mural depicting the Nativity by Manuel Perez Paredes in the
Nuestro Señor del Veneno Temple on Carranza Street in Mexico City.
Source: Wikimedia Commons.
Christina Rossetti establishes the bleak setting in the
first stanza of “In the Bleak Midwinter.” The next three stanzas all play
with a central paradox that obviously delights Rossetti:
Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him
Nor earth sustain;
Heaven and earth shall flee away
When He comes to reign:
In the bleak mid-winter
A stable-place sufficed
The Lord God Almighty,
Jesus Christ.
Enough for Him, whom cherubim
Worship night and day,
A breastful of milk
And a mangerful of hay;
Enough for Him, whom angels
Fall down before,
The ox and ass and camel
Which adore.
Angels and archangels
May have gathered there,
Cherubim and seraphim
Thronged the air,
But only His mother
In her maiden bliss,
Worshipped the Beloved
With a kiss.
“In the Bleak
Midwinter,” stanzas 2-4
Christina
Rossetti
Each of these stanzas contrasts the infinity of heaven with
the cramped poverty of a stable. More to the point, they contrast the incomprehensible
vastness of the nature of God with the tiny newborn baby. This is
Rossetti’s favorite paradox: the Lord God Almighty—omnipotent and
omniscient—compacted into a fragile child.
Many poets have explored this Christian paradox. My
favorite is John Donne, the 16th century English metaphysical poet perhaps
best known for his famous sermon line, “No man is an island…” Donne loved
paradoxes and frequently worked his poems around them. He wrote a
21-sonnet series called “La Corona” which includes a sonnet focused on this
particular paradox inherent in the nativity.
Immensity cloistered in thy dear
womb,
Now leaves his welbelov'd
imprisonment,
There he hath made himself to his
intent
Weak enough, now into our world to
come;
But Oh, for thee, for him, hath
th'Inne no roome?
Yet lay him in this stall, and from
the Orient,
Stars, and wisemen will travel to
prevent
Th'effect of Herod's jealous
general doom;
Seest thou, my Soul, with thy
faith's eyes, how he
Which fills all place, yet none
holds him, doth lie?
Was not his pity towards thee
wondrous high,
That would have need to be pitied
by thee?
Kiss him, and with him into Egypt goe,
With his kind mother, who partakes
thy woe.
“Nativity”
John
Donne
While Rossetti is content to contrast the infinite nature of
God with the stable, Donne goes even further by starting with the infinite
inside the womb. Once Jesus is in the stable, Donne continues to stress
God’s nature “Which fills all place…” This is the exact same paradox that
Rossetti embraces when she envisions a God so great that even “Heaven cannot
hold him.”
To use a modern metaphor that would have been completely
alien to both Donne and Rossetti, the baby is like the image of an unimaginably
compacted universe in the instant before the big bang. The power within
is infinite. The size infinitesimal.
Detail of "Crucifixion, Nativity, Annunciation," unknown artist,
possibly made in Padua, Italy, circa 1320-30, from the collection of
the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
The Music Room
Norwegian a capella group The Funka sing “In the Bleak
Midwinter,” including Norwegian lyrics…
Reference Sources
Poems of Christina
Rossetti, edited by William M. Rossetti
Selected Poems of
Christina Rossetti, edited by Marya Zaturenska
Christina Rossetti: A
Writer’s Life by Jan Marsh
The Achievement of
Christina Rossetti, edited by David A. Kent
Christina Rossetti
(Bloom’s Major Poets), edited by Harold Bloom
Christina Rossetti’s
Faithful Imagination by Dinah Roe
Christina Rossetti:
Faith, Gender and Time by Diane D’Amico
Genius by Harold
Bloom
The Man Who Invented
Christmas by Les Standiford
The Pre-Raphaelites
by Andrea Rose
Victorian Painting
by Christopher Wood
... and an occasional sneak glance at Wikipedia entries (but
always double-checking everything!)
In Christina Rossetti’s poem “In the Bleak Midwinter,”
mention of snow in the fifth line prompts a memorable incantation of endless
snowfalls.
In the bleak mid-winter
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 mid-winter
Long ago.
The repetition of “snow on snow/Snow on snow” has long been
my favorite moment in the entire poem. These are not the pretty
snowflakes of Christmas cards. This snow is defined by the context:
the bleak winter, the frosty winds, the frozen ground, the ice.
Snow is the final ingredient added to the wintry mix.
It coats Rossetti’s bleak landscape in whiteness. White is a tricky color
in art. There’s one set of traditional imagery that places the good guys
in white and the bad in black, but that’s not Rossetti’s way. The
whiteness of her landscape is a frigid blankness.
Rossetti was probably unfamiliar with the work of her
American contemporary Herman Melville, who published Moby-Dick in 1851. Nevertheless, her bleak use of white
reminds me of Melville’s exploration of whiteness in Chapter 42 of Moby-Dick, “The Whiteness of the Whale.” Melville writes:
An illustration by A. Burnham
Shute from an 1892 edition of Moby-Dick.
Source: Wikimedia Commons
“Is it that by its indefiniteness
it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus
stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white
depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much
a color as the visible absence of color; and at the same time the concrete of
all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full
of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colorless, all-color of atheism from
which we shrink?”
Many years before I read Moby-Dick, I learned about this horrific view of whiteness when reading a book
called Horror in the Cinema by
Ivan Butler. In discussing the weird early sound movie Vampyr (1932) by Carl Dreyer, Butler references Melville
in his discussion of a nightmarish scene where a doctor becomes trapped in a flour mill. White eerily predominates in the scene as the character
disappears under blankets of flour. With Melville in mind, Butler suggests that a pervasive whiteness
can be more terrifying than the dark.
I think this is the white-upon-white/snow-upon-snow effect
that Rossetti summons up in the opening stanza of “In the Bleak
Midwinter.” It’s the vast whiteness of “heartless voids and immensities”
and of “a colorless all-color of atheism from which we shrink.” It is
Rossetti’s image of the world without God—infinite, frozen, and devoid of color.
The evil doctor is buried alive in the flour mill in Carl Dreyer's Vampyr (1932).
The Music Room
Allison Crowe performs “In the Bleak Midwinter” on her live television
special Tidings…
Reference Sources
Poems of Christina
Rossetti, edited by William M. Rossetti
Selected Poems of
Christina Rossetti, edited by Marya Zaturenska
Christina Rossetti: A
Writer’s Life by Jan Marsh
The Achievement of
Christina Rossetti, edited by David A. Kent
Christina Rossetti
(Bloom’s Major Poets), edited by Harold Bloom
Christina Rossetti’s
Faithful Imagination by Dinah Roe
Christina Rossetti:
Faith, Gender and Time by Diane D’Amico
Genius by Harold
Bloom
The Man Who Invented
Christmas by Les Standiford
The Pre-Raphaelites
by Andrea Rose
Victorian Painting
by Christopher Wood
... and an occasional sneak glance at Wikipedia entries (but
always double-checking everything!)
“In the Bleak Midwinter,” a poem by Christina Rossetti
Frosty Wind Made Moan
The Little Match Girl, illustration by Bertall.
Source: Wikimedia Commons
“Frosty wind made moan.” This line, the second line in
the first stanza of Christina Rossetti’s “In the Bleak Midwinter,” reverberates
for me.
In the bleak mid-winter
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 mid-winter
Long ago.
Here’s the uncomfortable connection I make with that line.
I take the train into Philadelphia
every workday. If you turn to the left after you pass through the turnstile
exit, you enter into a vast underground concourse connecting various CenterCity
stations. Very wide passageways lead into the distance, punctuated by
columns. Homeless people sleep down here, especially in winter.
It’s cold, but they can escape the frosty winds that blow outside.
On the way to work, I pass other areas where homeless people
sleep. There’s one church that hospitably allows a homeless man to rest
in his sleeping bag on the top step of a side entrance. He always has his
back turned as I walk by. The wind blows off the SchuylkillRiver
and down the street, sometimes creating a fierce wind tunnel.
In winter, I leave the heated train, walk a brisk eight
blocks through the cold, and find sanctuary in a toasty office. Outside,
the frosty winds still make moan but I’m comfortable inside.
Christina Rossetti writes about people living outside in the
cold. An inn would have been cold but at least the walls protected
visitors from the winds. For Joseph and
Mary, however, a stable-place sufficed. Along with the animals, they were
exposed to the elements, with about as much protection as the homeless man who
sleeps by the church door. This is where Mary gives birth to her baby.
There was poverty in Bethlehem.
There was poverty in Rossetti’s London,
where an estimated 30,000 children were living homeless on the streets.
There’s poverty today.
The frosty winds still blow, the poor remain with us, and
Rossetti’s final question continues to haunt:
What can I give him
Poor as I am?
especially when viewed in context of the challenge that
Jesus posed as an adult (Matthew 23:45):
“Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of
these, you did not do for me.”
The little match girl, warming herself with matches, dreams of a
Christmas tree in Jean Renoir's The Little Match Girl (1928).
