From “In Memoriam” in which, the poet, deep in mourning, over hundreds of stanzas, gropes for the light over three Christmases, as time slowly closes over the loss of a dear friend and faith slowly covers over his mourning. Christmas and a new year were the milepost at every painful turning. November is the month in which we especially remember the dead. December, and Christmas, are when we miss them the most.
FROM STANZA XXVIII
The time draws near the birth of Christ.
The moon is hid, the night is still;
The Christmas bells from hill to hill
Answer each other in the mist.
FROM STANZA LXXVIII
Again at Christmas did we weave
The holly round the Christmas hearth;
The silent snow possess’d the earth
And calmly fell our Christmas-eve.
The yule-log sparkled keen with frost,
No wing of wind the region swept,
But over all things brooding slept
The quiet sense of something lost.
FROM STANZA CIV
The time draws near the birth of Christ;
The moon is hid, the night is still;
A single church below the hill
Is pealing, folded in he mists.
A single peal of bells below,
That awakens in this hour of rest
A single murmur in the breast
That these are not the bells I know.
Like stranger’s voices here they sound,
In lands where not a memory strays,
Nor landmark breaths of other days,
But all is new unhallow’d ground.
FROM STANZA CV
Tonight ungather’d let us leave
This laurel, let this holly stand:
We live within the stranger’s land,
And strangely falls our Christmas-eve.
FROM STANZA CVI
Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying clouds, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.
FROM STANZA CXXXI (CONCLUDING)
That God, which ever lives and loves,
One God, one law, one element,
And one far-off divine event,
To which the whole creation moves.
1850
Just fragments in which earth and mortals regenerate, mid-way in a century that was struggling to retain the “old” faith. Tennyson, nonetheless moves from despair to hope. Tennyson is not my poetic soul-mate in many particulars, out of sorts — along with the likes of Charles Kingsley — with the important Oxford Movement, in which Saint John Henry Newman was about to remove himself, and lead other churchmen, out of the slowly sinking barque of Anglicanism.
But he knew Christmas for what it was and must always be for us, however great the darkness.
2021
19 Cent Notebook 