Poet's Choice

Christmas nostalgia can come to even the most secular people, even to a secular Jew like me. The eerie beauty of "O Little Town of Bethlehem" impressed me mightily in grade school, our high voices soaring, in the little town where I grew up:

O little town of Bethlehem!

How still we see thee lie,

Above thy deep and dreamless sleep,

The silent stars go by;

Yet in thy dark streets shineth

The Everlasting light;

The hopes and fears of all the years

Are met in thee tonight.

Years later I learned that this is the first stanza of a poem by Phillips Brooks (1835-1893), written on a visit to Bethlehem in 1868.

Brooks was famous in his time for a sermon he delivered on the subject of the Civil War dead. The silent, dark streets he describes in the poem call to mind the silence of the young men missing from little towns all over the North and the South. The "deep and dreamless sleep" of death permeates the stanza and reflects those years of public, political "hopes and fears" as well as personal ones. The language of the stanza gains power from those invisible hopes and fears and that implicit silence of the dead. Paradoxically, the "everlasting light" of his Christian belief shines in Brooks's "dark streets."

In contrast, Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), in his Christmas poem "The Oxen," chose to write about a folk belief. He treated the legend that the beasts kneel at midnight on Christmas Eve with a wistful, skeptical dignity. The loyalty to old ways manifests itself in the regional dialect terms "barton" (a farmyard) and "coomb" (a valley).