Today’s Poem: The House of Christmas

The place where God was homeless / And all men are at home

Fritz von Uhde, Winter landscape, Christmas Eve, 1890 (Wikimedia Commons)

The House of Christmas

by G.K. Chesterton

There fared a mother driven forth
Out of an inn to roam;
In the place where she was homeless
All men are at home.
The crazy stable close at hand,
With shaking timber and shifting sand,
Grew a stronger thing to abide and stand
Than the square stones of Rome.

For men are homesick in their homes,
And strangers under the sun,
And they lay on their heads in a foreign land
Whenever the day is done.
Here we have battle and blazing eyes,
And chance and honour and high surprise,
But our homes are under miraculous skies
Where the yule tale was begun.

A Child in a foul stable,
Where the beasts feed and foam;
Only where He was homeless
Are you and I at home;
We have hands that fashion and heads that know,
But our hearts we lost — how long ago!
In a place no chart nor ship can show
Under the sky’s dome.

This world is wild as an old wives’ tale,
And strange the plain things are,
The earth is enough and the air is enough
For our wonder and our war;
But our rest is as far as the fire-drake swings
And our peace is put in impossible things
Where clashed and thundered unthinkable wings
Round an incredible star.

To an open house in the evening
Home shall men come,
To an older place than Eden
And a taller town than Rome.
To the end of the way of the wandering star,
To the things that cannot be and that are,
To the place where God was homeless
And all men are at home.
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It’s tempting to say that G.K. Chesterton (1874–1936) lived for Christmas, but he seemed to live for everything he did: always a roaring enthusiasm in his writing for whatever caught his eye.

Still, there’s something especially eye-catching about Christmas: red and green, with pictures of a star and shepherds and kings, and the Christ child in a manger. And there’s something especially roaring in the season: a raging fire, a towering blaze, to warm us in midwinter. And so Chesterton embraced Christmas in a way surpassed only by Dickens in English literature.

And why not? It is a place where our festival practices — partly pagan, often commercialized, frequently absurd, always extravagant — weaken the wall between the natural and the supernatural, allowing, if we only raise our eyes, a sight of something beyond us. “The great majority of people will go on observing forms that cannot be explained,” he observed. “They will keep Christmas Day with Christmas gifts and Christmas benedictions; they will continue to do it; and some day suddenly wake up and discover why.”

Here at Poems Ancient and Modern, we’ve offered Chesterton poems twice before: the parodies of “Variations of an Air” and the comedy of “A Ballade of Suicide.” “The House of Christmas,” Today’s Poem here on Boxing Day, is perhaps more typical of Chesterton. Or at least of his love of paradoxical phrasings readers often note. “Christmas is built,” he once wrote, “upon a beautiful and intentional paradox, that the birth of the homeless should be celebrated in every home.” As the poem develops the thought: We shall all come at Christmas to the stable: “To the place where God was homeless / And all men are at home.”

The meter of “The House of Christmas” is unexpected, in five eight-line stanzas rhymed abcbddda. Ballad meter feels familiar and natural to English readers — a four-foot line followed by a three-foot line, rhymed on the three-foot line — and each stanza opens with four lines of that form. But Chesterton’s stanzas follow those lines with three rhymed lines of tetrameter, defeating the expectation, and then close with a return to trimeter, and sometimes a difficult trimeter at that. I read the last line of the first stanza as “Than the squáre stónes of Róme,” for example. But through it all we get the Christmas story in distinctly Chestertonian garb: “This world is wild as an old wives’ tale, / And strange the plain things are.”

Taddeo Gaddi, Annunciation to the Shepherds, c. 1328 (Wikimedia Commons)

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