Christmas Eve by Christina Rossetti
Christmas hath darkness
Brighter than the blazing noon,
Christmas hath a chillness
Warmer than the heat of June,
Christmas hath a beauty
Lovelier than the world can show:
For Christmas bringeth Jesus,
Brought for us so low.
Earth, strike up your music,
Birds that sing and bells that ring;
Heaven hath answering music
For all Angels soon to sing:
Earth, put on your whitest
Bridal robe of spotless snow:
For Christmas bringeth Jesus,
Brought for us so low.
This deceptively simple and musical lyric by Christina Rossetti brings us to
Christmas Eve. But for all its incantatory rhythm and lilting feel, this is not some shallow rhyme or the pious platitudes we encounter in many a Victorian hymn. Rather, it adumbrates the themes, and goes right to the heart of those paradoxes we have been contemplating throughout Advent: darkness and light, winter and spring, the meeting of heaven and earth; above all, the theme of kenosis, the self-emptying, the courteous descent of our loving God into human flesh. For many people in our consumer society the loud, brash, insistent, garish, glaring Christmas lights, the constant background “muzak”, the winking tinsel and trivial shininess of everything can become, ironically, very oppressive. And it’s in that context that we can welcome the beautiful paradox with which this poem opens.
We have a poet who is embracing rather than resisting the dark and cold at this time of year. And there is something very moving in the simplicity and long reach of the repeating line – the ‘burden’ as it is technically called – at the end of each verse: ‘Brought for us so low’. We know that the Incarnation is just the beginning of the divine descent, and that he will be brought low in the modern sense, with low spirits, darkness, depression, the agony in the garden and he will be brought low down through the grave and gate of death, and lower still, descending into hell.
It is all ‘for us’, for however low we fall, we will always find that ‘underneath are the everlasting arms’.
Deuteronomy 33.27
This is an extract from Waiting on the Word by Malcolm Guite, published by Canterbury Press.
Author: Malcolm Guite
Date: 14 December 2015
Feature Image: Old Christmas card (WikiCommons, P.D.)