Now that the Christmas season is over—December 25th to Epiphany—the holiday decorations have come down, and it is noticeable. And so this poem is fitting. I heard this poem read on the The Daily Poem podcast which is a production from Goldberry Studios, hosted by Sean Johnson. This is a wonderful podcast that you don’t have to be an expert in poetry to enjoy a poem every day. I find Sean Johnson very knowledgeable and very likable. Each episode I would estimate to be roughly ten minutes, so it’s easy for a quick listen or to binge on a series when you have fallen behind. The episode for this poem can be found here.
My
analysis below will be independent of Sean John’s comments, though we pretty
much have the same reading of the poem.
You’ll get double insight by reading my post and listening to his
podcast comments.
The
Christmas Tree
by C. Day-Lewis
Put out the lights now!
Look at the Tree, the
rough tree dazzled
In oriole plumes of
flame,
Tinselled with twinkling
frost fire, tasseled
With stars and moons—the
same
That yesterday hid in the
spinney and had no fame
Till we put out the
lights now.
Hard are the nights now:
The fields at moonrise
turn to agate
Shadows as cold as jet;
In dyke and furrow, in
copse and faggot
The frost’s tooth is set;
And stars are the sparks
whirled out by the north wind’s fret
On the flinty nights now.
So feast your eyes now,
On mimic star and
moon-cold bauble;
Worlds may wither unseen,
But the Christmas Tree is
a tree of fable,
A phoenix in evergreen,
And the world cannot
change or chill what its mysteries mean
To your heart and eyes
now.
The vision dies now
Candle by candle: the
tree that embraced it
Returns to its own kind,
To be earthed again and
weather as best it
May the frost and the
wind.
Children, it too had its
hour—you will not mind
If it lives or dies now.
The poem has a fascinating structure, four stanzas of seven lines each (called a heptastich or septet) with a rhyme scheme of ABCBCCA. The first and seventh lines of all four stanzas end with the word “now.” The second through fifth lines form a quatrain of BCBC and the sixth line repeats the C sound, forming an inner quintain (five line poem). Perhaps the most well known quintain is “To a Skylark” by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Interestingly Day-Lewis also has an analogy of a bird in his poem, an oriole in the third line. This inner quintain is then framed by the two lines ending with the repeated word “now.” While septet stanzas are popular in English literature (Chaucer, Spenser, Herbert, and others) I could not find another example of this rhyme scheme. Seven lines is half a sonnet, and it does have the feel of an incomplete sonnet. Typically septets tend to allude to the mysterious or numinous, seven being the number of days of creation in Genesis. This poem certainly does that.
The line lengths are also rather interesting. They alternate between a short line of five to seven syllables and a long line of nine to fourteen syllables. The first line of a stanza is always a five syllable line ending with “now,” and the last line is short line with an extra syllable or two ending with “now.” The short lines seem to anchor the stanza lyrically while the long lines tend to unwind into a contemplative recitative. The meter of the lines are varied and what I can only see as sprung rhythm, a natural unfixed pattern based on the number of stressed syllables per line. I did not decompose the poem into the number of stressed syllables per line, but it would not surprise me if there was a pattern. (If someone does that decomposing and finds the pattern, please let us know.)
So what is this poem about? Let’s understand the progression of thought from stanza to stanza.
In the first stanza we are presented with a decorated Christmas tree, magnificently “dazzled/In oriole plumes of flame.” “Put out the lights now” seems to be an imperative command to shut the lights in the room so that one can fully absorb the dazzling brightness of the decorated tree, a tree that only yesterday stood in its natural environment, “in the spinney.” “Put out the light” can also refer to the extinguished lights on the tree at the end of the poem when the holiday is over and the tree taken down. That gives the poem a circular structure.
In the second stanza, in the “now,” with the tree dazzling inside, we are presented with the “hard” world outside with its winter hardships, where even the shadows are cold and stars are sparks blown about by the north wind.
In the third stanza, in the “now,” and again presented with the dazzling Christmas tree, we see the tree in its mystery capable of overcoming nature’s disintegrating forces, worlds withering and such. The tree is a “phoenix in evergreen,” the phoenix being a symbol of resurrection rising from burning ashes.
In the fourth and final stanza, the “now” is gone, the vision “dies” as does the tree as it is tossed into the outside world of frost and wind to decompose in the natural elements. The decorations are “candle by candle” put out as the holiday has passed. The tree “had its hour” but that hour has passed and will shortly go out of mind.
The circular aesthetic is brought out. So the tree, like Christmas, will be over, and come next year, the “Tree” (capitalized to represent a universal, platonic tree) will phoenix like be resurrected in another tree. The poem incorporates a tension between a “now” and a timeless moment that is re-presented before us every Christmas. “Tree” is capitalized twice—in the second line of the first stanza and fourth line of the third stanza. It is contrasted with the lower case “tree,” which stands for the specific tree of this specific Christmas.
This little drama is set within the cosmic context of moon and stars, fields and copses, nights and frost, shadows and north wind whirling. These represent the forces of nature that wish to degenerate, but they also represent the mystical forces that regenerate. That which disintegrates will also regenerate.
I
believe the poem alludes to two famous Shakespearean soliloquies. First, there is the “put out the light”
allusion in Othello where just before
Othello smothers Desdemona he speaks this famous soliloque.
Yet she must die, else
she’ll betray more men.
Put out the light, and
then put out the light:
If I quench thee, thou
flaming minister,
I can again thy former
light restore,
Should I repent me: but once
put out thy light,
Thou cunning’st pattern
of excelling nature,
I know not where is that
Promethean heat
That can thy light
relume.
Othello, Act 5, Scene 2, ll. 6-13
Here
the extinguishing of light refers to death, a death that cannot be brought back
to life. The other allusion is to the “Tomorrow
and Tomorrow” soliloquy from Macbeth. Macbeth upon hearing of his wife’s death
falls into this despair.
Tomorrow, and tomorrow,
and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace
from day to day
To the last syllable of
recorded time,
And all our yesterdays
have lighted fools
The way to dusty death.
Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking
shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his
hour upon the stage
And then is heard no
more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of
sound and fury.
Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5, ll. 19-28
This too is about death, and a nihilistic sense of the lack of meaning of life. Day-Lewis’s poem takes elements from these two Shakespearean soliloquies and contrasts the nihilism of their message (Shakespeare is not a nihilist; it’s the characters of the play who are expressing their despair) with the universal hope of Christmas coming round every year. While Desdemona’s “light” is put out, and the tree’s lights snuffed out, the Tree’s lights will not end and, indeed, will return. While the “lighted fool” of Macbeth will “strut and fret its hour upon the stage/ And then is heard no more,” and the light of the “tree” will extinguish, the light of the “Tree” will return.
The
central theme of Day-Lewis’s poem I think can be found in the third stanza:
Worlds may wither unseen,
But the Christmas Tree is
a tree of fable,
A phoenix in evergreen,
And the world cannot
change or chill what its mysteries mean
To your heart and eyes now.
The “fable” is not referring to a false story but alludes to what is always true. The Christmas Tree is always true because Christmas will return and a new tree will be put up.
Here are some of my favorite lines from the poem. From the first stanza: “Look at the Tree, the rough tree dazzled/In oriole plumes of flame/Tinselled with twinkling frost fire, tasseled/With stars and moons.” From the second stanza: “In dyke and furrow, in copse and faggot/The frost’s tooth is set;/And stars are the sparks whirled out by the north wind’s fret/On the flinty nights now.” I already gave that key sentence from the third stanza, and from the fourth stanza we have this: “the tree that embraced it/Returns to its own kind,/To be earthed again and weather as best it/May the frost and the wind.”
Sean Johnson did make one observation I missed. The “oriole plumes of flame” in the first stanza connect with the rising phoenix of the third stanza. The oriole is a bird plumed in black and orange, and so can seem like a bird in flames. I really appreciate that given that in baseball I am a Baltimore Orioles fan.
There
is an audio clip of Cecil Day-Lewis reading this poem himself. I hope you enjoy it.
I
hope you had a wonderful Christmas.
Until next year, keep Christmas in your heart and before your eyes now.
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