A quick hello to quite a few new subscribers this week — thanks for reading. Though I’ve now turned payments on (so you can pay me if you really have a burning desire to do so), this newsletter is all free, including the archive. I write about poetry and its translation in several languages and from a few different angles, but I try to mix it up. I know I have readers from various different backgrounds — some Latinists, for instance, some who are interested in early modern literature, and others who follow mainly contemporary poetry in English. Comments, queries and suggestions for posts are very welcome, either as comment on the site or via email.
We’re into Advent now, so your thoughts might be turning to favourite Christmas poems. My personal tastes in this regard are rather unsophisticated. I think the best Christmas poems are almost all songs — from medieval lyrics down to contemporary carols — though I also have a soft spot for a handful of Christmas pieces by Wendy Cope, Geoffrey Hill and John Betjeman, plus a couple more we’ll get to at the end.
There were plenty of Christmas poems in early modernity, too — if you know the English poetry of that period well, you might think at once of some of the best known of them, like Milton’s ‘Nativity Ode’ (an extraordinary but ultimately rather chilly poem, I’ve always thought) and Southwell’s ‘Burning Babe’, which Ben Jonson particularly admired. According to Drummond, Jonson said that he would happily have destroyed many of his own poems to have written Southwell’s.1 In the sixteenth and seventeenth century, the writing of seasonal verse — often in Latin, and generally in response to the set collects or scripture readings for the week — was a very common school and university exercise, as well as a popular private practice. There are hundreds if not thousands of poems of this type still extant in manuscript.
One thing that particularly interests me about early modern Latin poetry is the question of — for lack of a better word — literary fashion. The Latin literature of this period has been so little studied, and is so little known, that it is generally treated (if at all) in one of two ways: either as monolithic, with anything written in Latin anywhere in Europe between the earliest Renaissance and the eighteenth century as indistinguishably “neo-Latin” (a horrible and critically useless term), understood only in relation to classical texts; or, alternatively, as if any given poem must be read as a kind of remarkable one-off, with no possibility of contextualisation. But early modern Latin literary culture was a lively and productive one, which functioned much more internationally than any vernacular literature of the time (indeed more so, perhaps, than any literary culture today). Of course in any living literature things go in and out of fashion, often quite quickly; there are crazes and vogues for particular authors or genres or metres, which sometimes last for many decades, and sometimes appear and disappear within just a few years. Someone who sat down to write a “Christmas” poem in Latin in 1570 did so quite differently from their counterpart in 1630 or 1690, just as any experienced reader would quickly spot the differences between English poems on the same topic from those three dates. (Imagine the contrast between Gascoigne vs Herbert vs Dryden.) In my last book I tried to offer a first map of how this looks in England, and how what was going on in Latin poetry relates to the much better known English poetry of the time.
Stock themes like the Nativity are very useful for these purposes. Since the essential content of a poem about the Nativity doesn’t change very much at all, reading a series of them gives you a real sense of what has changed in style, form and approach. One of the most obvious fault-lines in English religious poetry — and to a large extent in English poetry in general — is that transition into what is traditionally called ‘metaphysical’ verse, but might more honestly be called (as it is elsewhere in Europe) ‘baroque’.2 Religious verse in this tradition is highly emotional and imaginative, often placing the speaker at the site of religious events. George Herbert’s ‘Christmas (I)’ poem, first published in The Temple (1633) is a good example:
After all pleasures as I rid one day,
My horse and I, both tired, body and mind,
With full cry of affections, quite astray;
I took up the next inn I could find.
There when I came, whom found I but my dear,
My dearest Lord, expecting till the grief
Of pleasures brought me to Him, ready there
To be all passengers' most sweet relief?
Oh Thou, whose glorious, yet contracted light,
Wrapt in night's mantle, stole into a manger;
Since my dark soul and brutish is Thy right,
To man of all beasts be not Thou a stranger:
Furnish and deck my soul, that Thou mayst have
A better lodging, than a rack, or grave.3
In fact, Southwell’s ‘Burning Babe’ is quite a similar poem, and its early date — Southwell was executed in 1595 — helps to explain why Jonson was so astounded by it. For anyone who’s read a lot of seventeenth-century religious poetry, Southwell’s poem is very good, but not really surprising. But if you try to forget your knowledge of seventeenth century poetry and immerse yourself only in the vernacular lyric of the 1580s and 1590s, you start to see what Jonson meant. Southwell, certainly influenced by Jesuit poetics as it was developing rapidly on the continent, had written something which was quite unlike much else in English at the time, or indeed in Anglo-Latin (Latin written in England).
Let’s compare for a moment Southwell or Herbert to the typical sorts of religious poetry we find in late sixteenth century England: the great majority are either versified hymns or prayers, more or less formal in their address, or they are quite strictly scriptural, even if rhetorically sophisticated. The crowning glory of this tradition is the Sidney Psalter — started by Philip Sidney but written mostly by his sister Mary, it’s an astonishing achievement which deserves its own post, so I’ll come back to it another day.
Here by contrast is something much more typical, an anonymous Anglo-Latin poet, probably a young man, writing one of a series of long Latin poems on Christmas in the late 1580s or 1590s. This particular poem, on the ‘location of the Nativity’ is accompanied by others on the timing of the Birth of Christ, its manner (by a Virgin), and its theological significance (God made man).4 This is a long extract, and the Latin is very simple and sometimes even a bit clumsy, so in this case I’m giving you just my translation:
On the location of the NativityThe creator of all things and of men is born in Bethlehem —And rightly in Bethlehem, for that was the city of DavidAnd Christ flowed forth from bright David’s line.The same city gave Christ to the world, and David.And rightly in Bethlehem, also, because there the Ark came to restA great foreshadowing of Christ’s future peace.And rightly in Bethlehem, too, because King David, anointed in that cityWas a sign of the royal glory of Christ the king.And rightly was it in Bethlehem, a great king in a small city,Since no-one should extol his land, or the cityIn which he was born, with empty tribute.And rightly in Bethlehem, called that house of bread.For Christ, the bread, comes down from heaven.The Saviour, however, is not born in the city itself,But outside the walls: this is because he is bornAs one saviour for all peoples: not only to save the Hebrews.Under a great rock near the city wallsThere was a dark cave used as a stable for cattle.Here the pious maiden Mary, shut out from everywhere elseCame and gave birth to the eternal king.There was no woman to act as midwife —But nor was it necessary. Once the holy infant is born,His own mother picks him up in a joyful embrace.This purest virgin, both mother and midwife,Swaddles the infant's limbs in ragsAnd offering sweet kisses to her infant boy,Places him between two beasts in the middle of the manger.The ox and the donkey adore the God who feeds them.With bended knee they worship their creator,And with their hot breath in that icy seasonThey warm Christ’s chilly limbs and offer welcome comfort.
I love the practical expansions here upon scripture and commentary: Mary has to manage without an obstetrix, a midwife, but she doesn’t need one; she wraps the baby in rags, as per the Gospel, but of course she kisses him as well; and the ox and the ass mentioned by Luke do not only kneel to adore the baby, they breathe their welcome warm breath upon him too.
This is rather touching, and it is imaginative in its way; but it’s still essentially a versification of the Gospel plus the standard commentaries on them, listing the series of historical and scriptural associations of Bethlehem — that’s where you’d get details like the Hebrew meaning of Bethlehem (‘house of bread’). In the manuscript marginal numbers refer us carefully to the relevant verses in Luke chapter 2. Any readers who are or have been practicing Christians have probably encountered almost identical types of scriptural exegesis today.
At the very beginning of the seventeenth century, a period in which epigrams were at their most intensely fashionable, we find many examples of Christmas epigrams. This one, on the symbolism of celebrating mass three times at Christmas, is much more succinct than our anonymous student late 16th century student, but its structured around the same point: that Bethlehem marks the convergence of Noah’s Ark, David and Christ.5 The final four lines run as follows:
Nocte prior, sub luce sequens, in luce supremaSub Noe, sub templo, sub cruce sacra notantSub Noe, sub Dauid, sub Christo sacra fuereNox, aurora, dies, vmbra, figura, deus.The first at night, the next at dawn, the last in the daylightThey mark rites under Noah, under the temple, under the cross:
Under Noah, under David, under Christ were sacredNight, dawn, day, shade, shape, god.
The very popular Epigrammata (1616) of the Dutch Jesuit poet Bernhard Bauhusius, however, one of the first Jesuit Latin poets to have a significant influence in England, treats the topic entirely differently. He writes in a highly emotive and imaginative mode, as if the poet were present at the manger, singing to the baby, and reminding Mary to shut the stable door.6
Lectule, lectule mi, dulcissime lectule, salue;Lectule liliolis, lectule strate rosis.Ah nec strate rosis, nec liliolis formosis;Verum & liliolis, & benè digne rosis.[…]Claude MARIA fores, en algida, nuda tremensquePrae foribus stat hyems; claude MARIA fores.Crib, my crib, my sweetest crib, greetings;Crib spread with tiny lilies, spread with roses.
Ah not spread with roses, nor with beautiful tiny lilies;But truly worthy of tiny lilies, and well worthy of roses.
[…]Mary, shut the doors, look how icy, naked and tremblingStands winter at the doors; Mary, shut the doors.
This placing of oneself at the Biblical scene derives from Jesuit meditative practice, but was quickly influential upon poets who were not themselves Jesuits or even Roman Catholics — including George Herbert, who, along with the Franco-Scot George Buchanan in the sixteenth century and the Polish Jesuit Casimir Sarbiewski, was among the most influential religious poets of the period in England.
The differences between Bauhusius, Herbert and Sarbiewski on the one hand, and our anonymous Christmas poems on the other, are primarily stylistic, not formal: if you have some Latin you might have noticed that both the epigrams (one anonymous, one by Bauhusius) are in the same metre (elegiac couplets), and the longer, discursive scriptural poem about the Nativity from the late sixteenth century is in hexameters. Boys at school learnt to compose in both these (related) metres at an early stage and we find plenty of poems in these forms at all periods.
Other metres, however, had more distinct ‘vogues’. In a manuscript from 1630s Oxford, we find quite a striking Nativity poem in iambic trimeter.7 Here’s an extract from it:
Auctorem suumHîc virgo peperit mater, hîc mundi ArbiterSummus, lac illo, quo tonuit, ore imbibit,Charâque nixus matre pendet ab ubereQuod ipse fecit, immò qui verbum fuitVagire discit quique diuino soletProdire patris ore nunc vterus parit.Here a virgin mother delivers her own creator — hereThe final judge of the world drinks milk with the sameMouth from which he thunders in judgement; he leansAnd hangs from his dear mother’s breast — a breastHe made himself; what’s more, he who was the WordLearns to cry and he who is used to proceedingFrom his father’s divine mouth is born forth by a womb.
Iambic metres, used in classical literature primarily for drama and invective, became highly fashionable in England in the first half of the seventeenth century, and were used in this period for many types of verse. Still, something of the iambic association with plain speaking comes through in this summary of the incarnation.
Milton’s Nativity Ode of 1629, on the other hand, belongs formally to a Pindaric tradition of grand religious lyric traceable to the Italian humanists and fashionable in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century: both Julius Caesar Scaliger and Maffeo Barberini, later Pope Urban VIII, composed devotional odes in Latin Pindarics, a very popular (though entirely unclassical) early modern form. Similarly, an anonymous poet in the 1650s begins a manuscript collection with two nativity poems — they are often found at the beginning of manuscript collections — one in hexameter and the second in dithyrambics, a highly irregular verse form linked to Pindar which became intensely fashionable just around this time.8
Well into the eighteenth century, the young Thomas Birch, probably in conscious imitation of Milton (whose Nativity Ode was dated Christmas morning 1629, when Milton was 21), notes that his poem was composed in a burst of inspiration on Christmas Day, 1723, aged 17.9 Birch’s ode is written in a four-line verse form known as alcaic stanzas, but it is a translation into Latin, apparently from the English of one J. Hughes. This, too, is typical of wider patterns: by the early eighteenth century, Latin lyric verse written in England was almost exclusively in alcaics and sapphics (the two most common metres in Horace’s Odes), and this is the period in which the translation of English verse into Latin was at its most popular and widespread.
Some modes of course were enduringly popular and seemingly resistant to fashion, or swayed only very slowly by it. The similarity in imagery between Virgil’s Eclogue 4 and parts of the Biblical book of Isaiah led to a long tradition of understanding Eclogue 4 as itself ‘messianic’: prophesying the birth of Jesus. The role of the shepherds – the singers of classical pastoral – in the nativity story tended to reinforce the association. So we find ‘Nativity eclogues’ pretty consistently throughout the period. Scipio Gentili published one, ‘Alcon’, in a collection containing mostly psalm paraphrases dedicated to Philip Sidney in 1581; over a hundred years later, a student at St John’s College Oxford in 1693 composed a Latin Christmas eclogue, probably as a university exercise.10 And there are modern examples too, the best of them I think Louis McNeice’s ‘An eclogue for Christmas’ and Seamus Heaney’s tribute to Virgil, the ‘Bann Valley Eclogue’. Heaney’s poem shares with some of the Latin verse I quoted above a touching domestic immediacy; we recognise a real baby, and real cows in Heaney’s version of Advent:
Child on the way, it won’t be long untilYou land among us. Your mother’s showing signs,
Out for her sunset walk among big round bales.
Planet earth like a teething ring suspended
Hangs by its world-chain. Your pram waits in the corner.
Cows are let out. They’re sluicing the milk-house floor.
Jonson, ‘Informations’ to William Drummond of Hawthornden’, in Bevington et al. (eds), Works of Ben Jonson, V. 369.
'Metaphysical’ is an exclusively British term used to describe the distinctive baroque style which, by contrast, swept Europe (and came from the continent). ‘Baroque’ was avoided for religio-political reasons — to an earlier generation of scholars it sounded a bit ‘Catholic’, and indeed calling the fashionable style of the early seventeenth century ‘metaphysical’ instead concealed quite well the extent to which it was indebted to primarily Jesuit models.
‘Christmas (I)’ and ‘Christmas (II)’ are sometimes printed together as a single poem in two different metrical ‘movements’. You can read them together here.
BL Harley MS 3258, fols 5v-6r. This interesting manuscript is certainly the work of an English Catholic, as many of the other poems demonstrate.
Bodleian MS Barlow 10, fol. 38v, ‘De tribus missis in natali Domini’.
Bauhusius, Epigrammata (Antwerp, 1616), sig. A5r, ‘In lectulum dulcissimi Infantis IESU recens nati’.
Bodleian Lat. misc. e. 32, fol. 3v-4r; the same poem is also in Bodleian MS Add. B. 109, fol. 105r-v (c.1650-4).
Bodleian MS Rawl. Poet 65, fol. 2r-v, ascribed to one Thomas Bickly. BL MS Lansdowne 846, dating probably from the 1680s, contains an example of Latin free verse on the nativity (fol. 75v).
BL Add MS 4456, fols 20r-21v.
Gentili, Paraphrasis Aliquot Psalmorum Davidis (1581), ‘Alcon, seu, De Natali Iesu Christi. Ecloga’, sig. Eiir-Eivv and Bodleian MS Rawl. D. 237, ‘In Christum Nascentem, Ecloga’, fols. 3r-v.
Fascinating! The heartfelt emphasis on warmth makes me think these December exercises were partly undertaken to take the mind off a cold college study... This post certainly helped me forgot I was sitting in a freezing rainy car park while reading!