A Sort of Christmas Card (2)

Last year it was TS Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi”.

This year, something much closer to home by Thomas Hardy.

And it feels right for us, living as we do, surrounded by livestock on the edge of our village on the borders of Oxfordshire and Northamptonshire.

Written during the First World War, Hardy recalls a Wessex folk tradition that, at midnight on Christmas Eve, the cattle kneel.

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 meek mild creatures where
They dwelt in their strawy pen,
Nor did it occur to one of us there
To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few would weave
In these years! Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
"Come; see the oxen kneel,

"In the lonely barton by yonder coomb
Our childhood used to know,"
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so.

Faith, mingled with doubt, and the wish to cling to childhood certainties.

Happy Christmas, one and all.

(Portrait photograph of Thomas Hardy by H Walter Barnett, c1909.)

The Dark Night of the Innovator

A really useful insight into the pathology of innovation is the fact that at some stage or another, even with projects that are being built with boundless enthusiasm, whistles and bells, nearly all of them run into difficulties surrounded by mounting disillusion.

This is “The Dark Night of the Innovator”. We have all been there, I guess.

So far as I can tell, the concept was first formulated by two colleagues at Synectics in the 1980s – John Philipp and Sandy Dunlop. I included it in a small book, Imagine, which I did for Synectics a few years later.

Even with the most perfect project plan (if there is such a thing), it’s important to remember that things will not always run smooth and that particular care and attention, skill and energy is needed in negotiating one’s way out of the Dark Night.

As the great twentieth century poet, TS Eliot, put it in his “The Hollow Men”:

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow.

Harold Monro, poet

For whatever reason, I’ve only recently connected with the early twentieth century Anglo-Scottish poet, Harold Monro. He seems to have slipped off the radar screen, but, among others, TS Eliot admired his work greatly.

Like so much good poetry, Monro’s could be downbeat. But it always has, like Eliot’s, a profoundly musical quality.

In “Living”, in a rather rare glimpse of life as possibility, after a “Slow bleak awakening from the morning dream”, he writes

But suddenly, as if without reason,
Heart, Brain, and Body, and Imagination
All gather in tumultuous joy together,
Running like children down the path of morning
To fields where they can play without a quarrel:
A country I’d forgotten, but remember,
And welcome with a cry.

I don’t think you have to be a poet to recognise that exhilarating creative cocktail. (But you do need to be one to capture it so eloquently.)

A sort of Christmas card

One of my favourite poems in this season is "Journey of the Magi". TS Eliot first published it as “a sort of Christmas card” in 1927. The first five lines are within quotation marks because Eliot had taken that passage from a sermon given by Lancelot Andrewes in 1622.

The whole is a reminiscence by one of the Magi (or Kings if you prefer) of almost incomprehensible change, told in old age.

I’m to read it at Evensong in the parish church of our village on the Northamptonshire-Oxfordshire border on the Sunday before the Twelfth Night, Ephiphany, marking the arrival of the Magi in Bethlehem.

Journey of the Magi

“A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.”
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times when we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wineskins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

Debrett’s informs us that “it’s simply not sufficient to send your ‘season’s greetings’ via Facebook”. No mention of the blogosphere. Ah well.

Happy Christmas!