Two Christmas Poems

Two years ago, after looking through a book of largely-festive Christmas poetry, I decided to compile my own favorite (slightly darker) Christmas and Advent poems into a binder. Here are two picks (I'm saving "Journey of the Magi" for Epiphany):

The Mother of God
~ William Butler Yeats

The threefold terror of love; a fallen flare
Through the hollow of an ear;
Wings beating about the room;
The terror of all terrors that I bore
The Heavens in my womb.

Had I not found content among the shows
Every common woman knows,
Chimney corner, garden walk,
Or rocky cistern where we tread the clothes
And gather all the talk?

What is this flesh I purchased with my pains,
This fallen star my milk sustains,
This love that makes my heart’s blood stop
Or strikes a Sudden chill into my bones
And bids my hair stand up?


In the Bleak Midwinter
~ Christina Rossetti

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.

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.

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 best museum exhibits are always just out of reach for me. I might not make it to New York in time to catch Poiret: King of Fashion at the Met, and I haven't figured out yet how to get to October 2000 - January 2001 to see Art Nouveau, 1890-1914 at the National Gallery. Curses, but that time travel is late in getting here.

All that being said, there's some value to exploring museums on the web. Not much, but some, I guess. The aforementioned National Gallery has a decent enough site on the aforementioned Art Nouveau exhibit, although it has one fatal flaw: it presumes that the visitor is far more interested in the exhibit itself than in its content. Bad form, National Gallery.

This is cheating, a little, as I actually saw this exhibition in person eight years ago, but it was outstanding: Nicholas and Alexandra: The Last Imperial Family of Tsarist Russia. It's presumably more depressing than was the Art Nouveau exhibition, but I rather like being so engrossed by a museum exhibit. Besides which, the items were stunning.

Then there's the most fun exhibition site I've found so far -- for the Victoria & Albert Museum's International Arts and Crafts, which ran in 2005. This site actually includes a program that lets you design your own Arts and Crafts tile and, subject to site approval, add it to an online gallery. Whee! It's the little things that amuse me, sadly.

Beginning at the Beginning

I tend to write introductions well after I've written most of the body of a text. So with that in mind, I've decided to let etymology do the talking instead.

The word "begin," according to the lovely and talented Online Etymology Dictionary, comes from the Old English word beginnan (sometimes onginnan, for some reason or other, except that it's apparently a stronger verb than the former), which itself derives from the root bi-, "be," and the West Germanic ginnan, which might mean "to open" or "open up." This possible definition links it to an Old High Germanic word in-ginnan, which means both "to cut open, open up" and "begin, undertake." Scintillating start to this blog, right there.

So given the fairly mundane etymology of "begin" (there are seriously better ones out there, and they will be presented randomly and with little actual relevance to anything, really, other than pure entertainment value), I'll give T.S. Eliot, from 1941's "Little Gidding," the last word:

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from. And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph.