Poetry Analysis: “The Christmas Tree” by Cecil Day-Lewis

Now that the Christmas season is over—December 25^th 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 Johnson’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.

 

I had never heard of Cecil Day-Lewis, not to be confused with C.S. Lewis.  Both were British, both Anglo-Irish, and both lived approximately contemporaneous with each other but I do not believe they were related.  Day-Lewis was actually a Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom for the last four years of his life, and yet I have never heard of him before.  This is the one and only poem of his that I have read, and I think a very good one.

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.

Poetry: “The Windhover” by Gerard Manly Hopkins, Part 1

As I continue on my annual poetry read, this year being that of Gerard Manly Hopkins, I want to analyze in some depth one of the most original poems in the English language, arguably Hopkins’ greatest poem, and for sure one of my all time favorite poems ever written, “The Windhover.”  Actually Hopkins himself said it was “the best thing I ever wrote.”  Here is the poem, but don’t be intimidated, I’ll walk you through it. 

The Windhover

To Christ Our Lord

I caught this morning morning's minion, king-
   dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
   Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
   As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
   Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing.

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
   Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

   No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
   Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

First let’s get some of the basics out of the way.  It’s an Italian sonnet where amazingly all eight endings of the octave have one rhyme, “-ing.”  [The octave is the first eight lines; the sestet is the remaining six lines.]  The octave here contains one complex thought, which I’ll shortly decompose, and the sestet breaks down into two thought units, one in the first three lines, the other in the last three lines.

If it is a sonnet, it’s a rather experimental sonnet.  Sonnets typically contain ten syllables, making that pentameter, and the rhythm is usually iambic, which means it follows a rhythm of unstressed/stressed, five times per line.  The very first line does follow an iambic pentameter meter, the bold being a stressed syllable.  Bold type below signifies a stressed syllable, while normal type is unstressed.

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-

But what is one to make of the second line:

dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding

Sixteen syllables!  And with no regularity.  I won’t do this for the whole poem, but here are the next three lines:

   Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,

The third line also has sixteen syllables, the fourth has fourteen syllables, and the fifth has eleven syllables.  There just isn't a pattern.

A couple of points can be made here about the meter.  Hopkins is a dissenter to the belief that natural rhythm of the English language is iambic.  He is actually prophetic here.  Other than Walt Whitman, and I don’t know if Hopkins was aware of Whitman’s poetry, no other poet before him broke from the iambic predominance in English poetry, with the possible exception of Robert Browning.  Browning had a penchant for quirky rhythms, Whitman considered his meter natural, and Hopkins called his meter “sprung rhythm.”  Between the three they pioneered what became known in the 20^th century as “free verse.” 

Hopkins’ stretching of the lines beyond the traditional pentameter is both an aesthetic statement of breaking with tradition and reflects the soaring flight of the falcon within the lines.  Adding or subtracting an extra foot (a single syllable) is not unusual, but adding six most definitely is.  Notice also the enjambment (the running of lines into the next) in the octave, and how that also reflects the soaring freedom of the bird.  It makes the poem run.  I don’t ever recall seeing a hyphenation (“king-dom”) in any poetry before modernism get fragmented so that the first syllable ends a line and the next enjambs into the next.  It probably has occurred, and I suspect someone will point it out to me, but it’s not in my memory banks.  Did Hopkins do it just to be different or for the rhyme?  No!  It has thematic significance, which I’ll point out in part two of this analysis.

So, allow me to break down what is literally going on.  From the first chunk of meaning from the octave we have this, which I’ll reformulate in linear form:

“I caught this morning morning's minion, king-/dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding/Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding/High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing/In his ecstasy!”

The poet saw a bird that morning, a falcon, who the poet calls a “dauphin” (a French aristocrat) and in whose flight appears to be either (a) being pulled in by the morning dawn light or (b) the falcon ahead of the dawn seemingly pulling the encroaching light across the sky.  Both of those meanings I think can fit “dawn-drawn Falcon.”  I’ve always seen it as (b) but I bet most people read it as (a).  Now the falcon is actually a windhover, which is a smaller species of falcon that can stop and hold itself still against the wind so that it appears to hover in the sky.  So to put this all together, the bird swooshes across the morning sky until he comes before the poet and just hangs still in an ecstasy. 

Now for the next chunk of meaning:

“then off, off forth on swing,/As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding/Rebuffed the big wind.”

After a moment of hovering, the falcon takes off, swooping like an ice skate heel pulling a precise turn.  In flight, the bird “rebuffs” the wind, that is, checks it or pushes back against it.  This is the first image of the bird in opposition to the wind.

“My heart in hiding/Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing.”

Here the narrator steps forth and tells how at a moment of weakness or fragility—how does one interpret “my heart in hiding”?—was looking for some inspiration, some incredible finesse, some incredible skill, some “mastery.”  That completes the octave, and to put the complex thought together what we have is a poet looking for some inspiration when early one morning he catches sight of a falcon coming across the dawn light.

The sestet has a b-c-b, c-b-c rhyme scheme, which so beautifully interlocks.  And Hopkins chooses some of the hardest words to rhyme: “chevalier” and “vermillion.”  The first three lines of the sestet brings a climax to the bird/wind opposition, and the last three lines explains the meaning of event that enfolded before his eyes.

“Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here/Buckle!”

Here is the climax: the falcon (“brute beauty”) in full skillful sweep collides with the air into a crash.  The metaphor (implied through “chevalier” and “dauphin”) is of jousting knights coming to a crash.  The collision is described as a “Buckle,” and, if anything, how he uses this word shows Hopkins to be a great poet.  What a word to choose here.  To some degree the whole poem rests on this word “Buckle.”  Notice how he enjambs the word to the next line and ends the sentence one word into the line.  That’s a bit unusual, but it gives the word an immense power.  But what does he mean?  When jousting knights collide, their spears buckle.  It means a collapsing and breaking open.  But it means more.  Hopkins is punning on the word.  Buckle, like a belt buckle, brings things together, binds them.  But in what way does a bird flying into the wind buckle?  Yes, it’s metaphorical.  But it’s more than that.  It’s metaphysical.  What buckles and breaks open and binds together is transcendence.

“AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion/Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!”

What breaks open is literally the morning sun bursting with light, lovely and dangerous.  The bird, the wind, the sun, God’s creatures within God’s elements are integrated and charged with spirit.

But Hopkins is not finished there.  He then goes on to explain what the drama that unfolded before him means with two incredible and contrasting metaphors.

“No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion/Shine”

From the lofty action-filled imagery of the falcon and the wind, all of a sudden Hopkins is talking about a plough?  The burst of light, he says, should not be a wonder.  Why?  Because a plough plodding through dirt shines.  From the transcendent imagery of falcon and air and light, Hopkins switches to that of plough and earth and mundane.  Here too that gleam of transcendence is encapsulated in the “shine” that bursts forth from the activity.  Even the word sillion—a word coined by Hopkins, meaning the turned over soil that is not as dusky as that on top—suggests the innate glimmer of the divine that shines in all things, not just with a falcon, but with lowly dirt.

“and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,/Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.”

Here he repeats how the divine is in everything with another image, embers in a fireplace.  As they burn, they fall and break open, and show the “gold vermillion” of its interior beauty.

That provides a reading of the poem.  This post is already a bit long, so I’m going to reserve the implications and aesthetic considerations in a part two, and even discuss a little controversy with this poem.  If you enjoyed this, stay tuned.