Today’s Poem: In the Bleak Midwinter
Christina Rossetti and divine self-giving
In the Bleak Midwinter
by Christina Rossetti
In the bleak midwinter, 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 midwinter, 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 midwinter a stable place sufficed The Lord God Almighty, Jesus Christ. Enough for Him, whom cherubim, worship night and day, Breastful of milk, and a mangerful of hay; Enough for Him, whom angels fall before, The ox and ass and camel which adore. Angels and archangels may have gathered there, Cherubim and seraphim thronged the air; But His mother only, 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. ═══════════════════════
Most of us know this famous 1872 poem by Christina Rossetti (1830–1894) as a Christmas carol. Perhaps we’ve sung it to the melody by Gustav Holst. Choral singers may be partial to its treatment by Harold Darke. As seasonal music, “In the Bleak Midwinter” is a sentimental stalwart, its final stanza, especially, seemingly calculated to move an entire Christmas-Eve congregation to weep.
But as tempting as it might be to dismiss Rossetti as a sentimentalist, what she accomplishes in the beautiful language of this poem, in five hexameter aabb quatrains — many of whose lines begin on stressed syllables, in what I like to call the strong attack — is something far less milquetoast, far more theologically profound, than we might at first imagine.
Significantly, in the first stanza, she transposes the Bethlehem stable into the key of the English winter, with its frozen earth and icy ponds. The poem’s opening imagery, however, does more work than simply evoking a bitter Dickensian Christmas scene, from which the coziness of the stable provides a welcome respite. It also does more work than simply pointing to Christ’s universality — though that’s hardly a negligible gesture — or suggesting that the geography of the Incarnation is “England and everywhere” (to misquote T.S. Eliot).
What’s important in this first stanza is that the whole earth is caught in a season of lament. If the ground is “hard as iron,” then the dead are frozen into it, entrapped. Similarly, the water, suggestive of the waters of baptism, is frozen solid, “like a stone.” It resembles nothing more, in fact, than a stone rolled over the entrance to a tomb. Beneath untold strata of snow, all creation sleeps the sleep of death.
But into this winter world descends a new life-giving life. As God, the infant in the manger needs nothing. As a human child, his needs are simple, few, and already met. When the narrative voice shifts into both the present tense and the first person in the last stanza, it is only to highlight the utter sufficiency of this newborn, his absolute absence of need.
He wants nothing. In turn, his worshipper has nothing to give — no lamb, no Magi’s wisdom. The worshipper, thawed in that presence, receives rather than gives. The child needs no gift. Even in utter helplessness, he is the incarnate image of divine generosity, offered as a gift. That gift to the impoverished human heart is its own restored generosity, its desire to give itself.
I’m struck by the colour palette of this. The only colour apart from white is, perhaps, ‘iron’—although here invoked for its hardness rather than its greyness—but otherwise: the midwinter is ‘bleak’, a word cognate to blank, blanched, bleached (from Middle English blak, blac “pale, wan”, and Old English blǣc, “pale, pallid”); the white snow is falling, and its fall is reiterated, making the whole world white; in the stable Jesus is fed with white milk and the shepherd brings a white lamb as gift. No other colours are mentioned. We might say that winter is a white kind of season, at least in the higher latitudes of the northern hemisphere—though surely not in the Holy Land—but a carol like ‘The Holly and the Ivy’, invoking the very non-Galilean holly bush, at least brings in the red berries as symbolic of the blood Christ will shed. Not this poem. The whiteness perhaps speaks to purity, holiness, of mother and baby, but I wonder if the colour scheme, or mono-colour scheme, doesn’t leach into all the elements mentioned: as if the angels and archangels, the cherubim and seraphim, become whitened by association, made of glass. Or the segue from stanza one (‘snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow’) to stanza two—‘Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him, nor earth sustain/Heaven and earth shall flee away when He comes to reign’—doesn’t suggest, obliquely, that God is descending to the earth (since Heaven cannot hold him) *as snow*, falling through the air as a cold white particulate purity—which earth cannot ‘sustain’, since nothing grows in winter, and God’s reign suggesting its homonym rain, which is what snow in its frozen way is. In line three the word snow is repeated five times; the poem has five stanzas; Christ on the cross suffered five wounds.
Lovely. Reminds me of Coleridge's line in Frost at Midnight: "He shall mould thy spirit, and by giving make it ask."