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Christmas Oratio -- W H Auden

Guest poem submitted by Carlynn Houghton, an excerpt from
(Poem #1413) Christmas Oratio
 Well, so that is that.  Now we must dismantle the tree,
 Putting the decorations back into their cardboard boxes --
 Some have got broken -- and carrying them up to the attic.
 The holly and the mistletoe must be taken down and burnt,
 And the children got ready for school.  There are enough
 Left-overs to do, warmed-up, for the rest of the week --
 Not that we have much appetite, having drunk such a lot,
 Stayed up so late, attempted -- quite unsuccessfully --
 To love all of our relatives, and in general
 Grossly overestimated our powers.  Once again
 As in previous years we have seen the actual Vision and failed
 To do more than entertain it as an agreeable
 Possibility, once again we have sent Him away,
 Begging though to remain His disobedient servant,
 The promising child who cannot keep His word for long.
 The Christmas Feast is already a fading memory,
 And already the mind begins to be vaguely aware
 Of an unpleasant whiff of apprehension at the thought
 Of Lent and Good Friday which cannot, after all, now
 Be very far off.  But, for the time being, here we all are,
 Back in the moderate Aristotelian city
 Of darning and the Eight-Fifteen, where Euclid's geometry
 And Newton's mechanics would account for our experience,
 And the kitchen table exists because I scrub it.
 It seems to have shrunk during the holidays.  The streets
 Are much narrower than we remembered; we had forgotten
 The office was as depressing as this.  To those who have seen
 The Child, however dimly, however incredulously,
 The Time Being is, in a sense, the most trying time of all.
 For the innocent children who whispered so excitedly
 Outside the locked door where they knew the presents to be
 Grew up when it opened.  Now, recollecting that moment
 We can repress the joy, but the guilt remains conscious;
 Remembering the stable where for once in our lives
 Everything became a You and nothing was an It.
 And craving the sensation but ignoring the cause,
 We look round for something, no matter what, to inhibit
 Our self-reflection, and the obvious thing for that purpose
 Would be some great suffering.  So, once we have met the Son,
 We are tempted ever after to pray to the Father;
 "Lead us into temptation and evil for our sake."
 They will come, all right, don't worry; probably in a form
 That we do not expect, and certainly with a force
 More dreadful than we can imagine.  In the meantime
 There are bills to be paid, machines to keep in repair,
 Irregular verbs to learn, the Time Being to redeem
 From insignificance.  The happy morning is over,
 The night of agony still to come; the time is noon:
 When the Spirit must practice his scales of rejoicing
 Without even a hostile audience, and the Soul endure
 A silence that is neither for nor against her faith
 That God's Will will be done, That, in spite of her prayers,
 God will cheat no one, not even the world of its triumph.
-- W H Auden
This  excerpt from Auden's "Christmas Oratio" captures the
post-Christmas letdown with fabulous humor and accuracy, and ties it so
beautifully to the human condition, to the ways we try to make sense of
the world.  Without undermining (indeed, the poem ends by affirming) our
rational thought processes, Auden illustrates the concurrent human need
for intimacy with the very world we objectify in order to understand.
"Remembering the stable where for once in our lives / Everything became
a You and nothing was an It" -- this poem was written during World War
II, and in our time, as in Auden's, objectification (they, them, their)
often seems like the cruellest of human hobbies, enabling individuals to
commit horrific and unnecessary acts of violence, and resulting also in
tragic failures to act due to indifference.  Sorry to go on -- actually,
I think the poem speaks well for itself.  Auden is nothing if not
didactic, except eloquent.

Carlynn.

62 comments: ( or Leave a comment )

Ian Baillieu said...

I don't disagree with Carlynn's enthusiastic assessment of
the content, but think this piece by Auden really tests the
boundary between unrhymed poetry and prose (without meaning
any disparagement of the latter).

It's presented as a poem, with line divsions and capitalised
line beginnings. On the other hand, the tone is
conversational; there's no apparent metre, either of the
syllabic or of the stress-pattern variety; there's frequent
enjambment; the grammar is intact; and the line divisions
mostly add little or nothing by way of poetic impact.

Disregarding the fact that it's part of a larger work, on
balance I'd class this piece by Auden as prose written with
poetical sensibility, unncessarily dressed up as a poem. I
don't think it would lose anything by being presented as
prose.

Glenn and Mary Peirson said...

I believe this should be titled "Christmas Oratorio", if I'm not
mistaken.

Glenn Peirson
Ontario, Canada

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