Poem of the Day: ‘The House of Christmas’

It would be tempting to say that G.K. Chesterton (1874–1936) lived for Christmas, but, then, he seemed to live for everything he did: always a roaring enthusiasm in his writing for whatever caught his eye. Still, there’s something especially eye-catching about Christmas: red and green, with pictures of a star and shepherds and kings, and the Christ child in a manger. And there’s something especially roaring in the season: a raging fire, a towering blaza, to warm us in midwinter.And so Chesterton embraced Christmas in a way surpassed only by Dickens in English literature. And why not? It is a place where our festival practices — partly pagan, often commercialized, frequently absurd, always extravagant — weaken the wall between the natural and the supernatural, allowing, if we only raise our eyes, a sight of something beyond us. “The great majority of people will go on observing forms that cannot be explained,” he observed. “They will keep Christmas Day with Christmas gifts and Christmas benedictions; they will continue to do it; and some day suddenly wake up and discover why.”Last year, for Palm Sunday, the Sun offered Chesterton’s “The Donkey” as a Poem of the Day. (We’ve also published his poems “The Rolling English Road” and “Variations of an Air.”) But today’s poem, “The House of Christmas,” is perhaps more typical of Chesterton — or at least of the part of him readers so often note: his love of paradoxical phrasings. “Christmas is built” he once wrote, “upon a beautiful and intentional paradox, that the birth of the homeless should be celebrated in every home.” As the poem develops the thought: We shall all come at Christmas to the stable: “To the place where God was homeless / And all men are at home.”The meter of “The House of Christmas” is unexpected, in five eight-line stanzas rhymed abcbddda. Ballad meter feels familiar and natural to English readers — a four-foot line followed by a three-foot line, rhymed on the three-foot line — and each stanza opens with four lines of that form. But Chesterton then gives three rhymed lines of tetrameter, defeating the expectation, and then closes the stanza with a return to trimeter, and sometimes difficult trimeter at that. I read the last line of the first stanza as “Than the squáre stónes of Róme,” for example. But through it all we get the Christmas story in distinctly Chestertonian garb: “This world is wild as an old wives’ tale, / And strange the plain things are.”The House of Christmasby G.K. ChestertonThere fared a mother driven forthOut of an inn to roam;In the place where she was homelessAll men are at home.The crazy stable close at hand,With shaking timber and shifting sand,Grew a stronger thing to abide and standThan the square stones of Rome.For men are homesick in their homes,And strangers under the sun,And they lay on their heads in a foreign landWhenever the day is done.Here we have battle and blazing eyes,And chance and honour and high surprise,But our homes are under miraculous skiesWhere the yule tale was begun.A Child in a foul stable,Where the beasts feed and foam;Only where He was homelessAre you and I at home;We have hands that fashion and heads that know,But our hearts we lost — how long ago!In a place no chart nor ship can showUnder the sky’s dome.This world is wild as an old wives’ tale,And strange the plain things are,The earth is enough and the air is enoughFor our wonder and our war;But our rest is as far as the fire-drake swingsAnd our peace is put in impossible thingsWhere clashed and thundered unthinkable wingsRound an incredible star.To an open house in the eveningHome shall men come,To an older place than EdenAnd a taller town than Rome.To the end of the way of the wandering star,To the things that cannot be and that are,To the place where God was homelessAnd all men are at home.___________________________________________With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.

Poem of the Day: ‘The House of Christmas’

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