Reality impingeing on Christmas-card stereotypes is also heard in “Journey of the Magi” by T.S.Eliot: one of the Wise Men is speaking: ” A cold coming we had of it, Just the worst time of the year This poem is copyright, but you can read it here. […]
All Poems
December 5 Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Christmas at Sea” is related by by a young deck-hand , who had run away to sea: The sheets were frozen hard, and they cut the naked hand; The decks were like a slide, where a seaman scarce could stand; The wind was a nor’wester, blowing squally off the sea; And cliffs […]
December 4 Thomas Hardy
Thomas Hardy, with characteristic nostalgia for the simple faith of bygone days, recalls a more homely rustic legend of this season in: THE OXEN Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock. “Now they are all on their knees,” An elder said as we sat in a flock By the embers in hearthside ease.We pictured the […]
December 3 Alfred Lord Tennyson
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, who followed Wordsworth as Laureate in 1850 set his description of ‘The Passing of Arthur,’ or ‘Morte D’Arthur,’ as a narrative related on Christmas Eve by a supposed poet, Everard Hall, “ mouthing out his hollow oes and aes”. So all day long the noise of battle roll’d Among the mountains by […]
December 2 Sir Walter Scott
As Sir Walter Scott writes in an introduction to “Marmion” Heap on more wood; the wind is chill, But let it whistle as it will, We’ll keep our Christmas merry still. and later in the same poem he describes an old-world Christmas in detail The fire, with well-dried logs supplied, Went roaring up the chimney […]
December 1 Edmund Spenser
And after him came next the chill December: Yet he, through merry feasting which he made And great bonfires, did not the cold remember; His Saviour’s birth his mind so much did glad. Upon a shaggy-bearded Goat he rode, The same wherewith Dan Jove in tender years, They say, was nourished by th’Idaean maid; And […]
October 8 Percy Bysshe Shelley
A more powerful and declamatory self-identification with autumnal Nature, proper to a Romantic poet, is heard in Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind”. In a note to the poem Shelley tells us that it was conceived and chiefly written in a wood skirting The Arno , near Florence, while a West wind was blowing up […]
October 7 William Shakespeare
An earlier sonnet expressing a very different emotional sympathy with the season is one of Shakespeare’s Sonnets upon the Autumn of love: That time of year thou mayst in me behold When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet […]
October 6 Roy Campbell
But Spenser’s October also had his ploughing-share and coulter (that is an iron cutter in front of the share) ready for action. Roy Campbell’s striking sonnet, “The Serf” shows a ploughman at work: His naked skin clothed in the torrid mist This poem is copyright, but you can read it here. Next: The Autumn of […]
October 5 Walter de la Mare
The emotional thrill of the supernatural is refined by Walter De la Mare to a sense of mystery and an eerie strangeness in his poem. THE LISTENERS. “Is there anybody there?” said the Traveller, Knocking on the moonlit door; This poem is still protected by copyright, But you can read it here. Next: The Serf […]