Today’s Poem: Twelfth Night
Sally Thomas on the closing of the Christmas season
Twelfth Night
by Sally Thomas
Already a spider’s run a shining skein Between one standing magus and one who kneels, Offering myrrh. Outside, a too-warm rain Pounds the early spears of daffodils Who’ve rushed their cue and think it’s Holy Week. Inside, the manger occupies all mantels. The child is everywhere, and wise men seek Him still, throughout the house. In knots of three They travel, bearing fragile gifts that break From their re-glued-on fingers. After thirty Christmases, these touring companies Begin to feel their age like you and me. Our berries drop. By shuddering degrees, Our candles drown themselves in waxen lakes. The tree’s a staring corpse. Stars in a blaze Of silver glitter, hung from wires like fish-hooks, Gaze down on the leavings time has strewn Before the infant king who, smiling, looks Steadfastly at the air, changeless and clean. ═════════════════════════
The Twelve Days of Christmas begin with Christmas, rather than end with the holiday — a point about the calendar made so repeatedly, to so little effect, that it’s not really worth mentioning again. Except perhaps to say that today is Epiphany, which marks the arrival of the Three Wise Men, bearing gifts for the infant Jesus. And that means that yesterday, January 5, was the twelfth day of Christmas — which made its evening Twelfth Night.
This was traditionally an evening of skits and parties, with a Lord of Misrule leading the festivities (a time of “cakes and ale,” as the drunken Sir Toby proclaims in Shakespeare’s own twelfth-night play). In Today’s Poem, however, the co-founder of Poems Ancient and Modern, Sally Thomas (b. 1964), takes up the other aspect of the festival, for Twelfth Night and Epiphany also mark an end to the joyous Christmas season.
We featured Sally’s poem “Swans” this past spring, and in her New Formalist poetry, she often employs difficult stanza forms. “Twelfth Night,” for example, is terza rima: sets of three-line stanzas in which the first and third lines rhyme, with the second line providing the rhyme for the next stanza.
The poem begins with a wry observation of the fact that the Christmas decorations have been up for weeks, long enough for a spider’s web to connect two of the Wise Men. Yet the time of these crèche figures is measured not just by the days they’ve been scattered around the house but by the many holidays they have been displayed with their “re-glued-on fingers.” And “After thirty Christmases, these touring companies / Begin to feel their age.”
In her pentameter lines, Sally Thomas sees, that by Twelfth Night, the detritus of Christmas is “the leavings time has strewn / Before the infant king” — both the leavings of this particular Christmas and the leavings of our lives over the many past years.
Thanks for this, Ms. Thomas, and for all your other contributions. For well over a year, I have felt as one in the hands of an extraordinary English professor. It is amazing how most of us mut annually use our fingers to count off the 12 days from Christmas. Presumably, Twelfth Night began as "Epiphany Eve"?
Lovely, and captures the mood of these days perfectly. It does make me wish I lived in a place with the possibility of early daffodils in January. I would settle for no snow during Holy Week.