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Yesterday was bright, sunny.   Nature smelled fresh from overnight rain.

Today morning snow flurries.  Grey and somber.

Time for more Christmas songs and winter poems.

Velvet Shoes

by Elinor Wylie (1921)

 

Let us walk in the white snow In a soundless space; With footsteps quiet and slow, At a tranquil pace, Under veils of white lace.   I shall go shod in silk, And you in wool, White as white cow’s milk, More beautiful Than the breast of a gull. We shall walk through the still town In a windless peace; We shall step upon white down, Upon silver fleece, Upon softer than these. We shall walk in velvet shoes: Wherever we go Silence will fall like dews On white silence below. We shall walk in the snow.

The traditional Christmas story feels somewhat out of touch in our current stage of economic progress. Very much apart from present everyday experiences.

Except for a few countries, there are no shepherds tending their sheep by night.  No one to see angels announcing news of great joy.  Nor an angelic host praising God with song.

Or might there be a modern day version of this event?

Not of shepherds tending flocks, but shoppers reviewing  lists.   A very busy, packed department store of last minute consumers seeking just the right gifts.

Not voices from afar but the growing impression of a musical sound.  And then suddenly an angelic choir, seemingly everywhere and nowhere, surrounding the crowd with exultation.

Yes, it did happen.  Really.  And with modern iPhones, the whole event was captured for all to witness.   Some were stunned with awe.  Others sang along with the joyful noise.  Some hugged their neighbors.

No one continued shopping.   It was too powerful an experience to continue with everyday tasks.  It interrupted immediate intentions and changed the sense of where everyone was at that time.

All  shared this rejoicing in the midst of a very busy time.

You can feel the  emotion in the event.   And experience it,  as the glory of Christmas captures everyone, at least for a moment.  The smiles, the sense of  exultation.   The wonderment !

Merry Christmas on this and every day.

“https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wp_RHnQ-jgU”

Words often feel special this time of year.   The following poems were written during tragic personal circumstances of both authors.   Each still affirms hope.

The first was converted to a popular Christmas carol, sung often today. The other, translated from Russian, celebrates life’s fullness even as it is near ending.

An American Poet Writes in the Face of Personal Tragedy

The circumstances of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s writing I heard the bells on Christmas Day, are clothed in tragedy and personal depression.   His wife, Fanny, had been killed two years earlier in a fire started as she was sealing envelopes with hot wax when a flame caught her clothes.

He was too badly burned to attend her funeral, and wore a beard for the rest of his life to disguise the scars on his face from trying to put out the flames.

As a 29 year old widower, he had courted Fanny for seven years before they were married.  In their 18 years together, they had six children. For Longfellow, they were the happiest time of his life.

Two years later, in 1863, his oldest son Charlie enlisted in the Union army against Longfellow’s wishes. The poet was a strong abolitionist, but also a pacifist.  Charlie  wrote his father from DC where he had joined the 1^st Massachusetts Artillery:

I have tried hard to resist the temptation of going without your leave but I cannot any longer, I feel it to be my first duty to do what I can for my country and I would willingly lay down my life for it if it would be of any good God Bless you all.  

He caught fever in June and took leave that summer to heal at home.  He rejoined the fight.  In November At New Hope, Va., he was shot, the bullet went through him from back to shoulder, just nicking his spine.

Longfellow brought his son back from DC to their home in Cambridge to convalesce, arriving on December 8^th.  Listening to church bells ringing at that time of year he was moved to write his poem (original words below) combing his anguish of war and hope for peace.

I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old, familiar carols play,
and wild and sweet
The words repeat
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

And thought how, as the day had come,
The belfries of all Christendom
Had rolled along
The unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

Till ringing, singing on its way,
The world revolved from night to day,
A voice, a chime,
A chant sublime
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

Then from each black, accursed mouth
The cannon thundered in the South,
And with the sound
The carols drowned
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

It was as if an earthquake rent
The hearth-stones of a continent,
And made forlorn
The households born
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

And in despair I bowed my head;
“There is no peace on earth,” I said;
“For hate is strong,
And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!”

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
“God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
The Wrong shall fail,
The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men.”

The carol version often omits the middle stances about the war in which “hate is strong and mocks the song of peace on earth, good will to men”.

But despondency is overcome with the affirmation that “God is not dead, nor doth He sleep” and that ultimately there will be “…peace on earth, good will to men”.

The Burl Ives recording of the carol from 1966 is the shortened version omitting the Civil War context.

A Poem of Hope from Russia

Osip Mandelstam was a Russian poet and essayist who lived there during and after the revolution and the rise of the Soviet Union. Born in 1891 he was educated in St. Petersburg, France and Germany.   In 1937 Mandelstam was arrested and sentenced to five years in a corrective-labour camp in the Soviet Far East. He died that year at a transit camp near Vladivostok.

He is considered one of the most significant Russian poets of the 20th century. This poem was written in the camp shortly before he died.

And I Was Alive

Written by Osip Mandelstam

Translated by Christian Wiman

And I was alive in the blizzard of the blossoming pear,
Myself I stood in the storm of the bird–cherry tree.
It was all leaflife and starshower, unerring, self–shattering power,
And it was all aimed at me.

What is this dire delight flowering fleeing always earth?
What is being? What is truth?

Blossoms rupture and rapture the air,
All hover and hammer,
Time intensified and time intolerable, sweetness raveling rot.

It is now. It is not.

(May 4, 1937)

Bosses Struggle to Respond to Burned Out Workers (Wall Street Journal, December 21, 2021)

“Workplace stress is rampant and resignations have risen; employers are trying four-day workweeks, mandatory vacation days and other new ways of working.

In the first 10 months of this year, America’s workers handed in nearly 39 million resignations, the highest number since tracking began in 2000.

Some want better jobs. Others, a better work-life balance. Still others want a complete break from the corporate grind. Almost two years into the pandemic that left millions doing their jobs from home, many Americans are rethinking their relationship with work.”

One the joys of our annual cycle of religious and secular observances is how past memories are often rekindled.  They arise in personal stories and from music primarily played at this time of year.

Last Friday my wife and had dinner with a 90-year-old couple, still living in their home.   The husband is still active in the credit union community.   He was 11 years old when WW II broke out.

As we finished the meal with Greek cookies bathed in powdered sugar, they recalled a time as children when war cake was served for dessert. The ingredients include little or no milk, sugar, butter, or eggs, because they were rationed, expensive or hard to obtain. When his father received a 5-pound bag of sugar as a gift for Christmas one year, he immediately turned it over to his church lest he be accused of violating ration limits.

Remembering times past makes them special, no matter what our worries were then.

Musical Joys with New Words

Music is especially potent in calling up special moments. I remember the first time I heard a live performance of the Handel’s Messiah.  During the Christmas season I was at Boston Symphony Hall, senior year in college, on a date with a young lady whom I would later marry.

Years later I heard the familiar sounds, but with different words.   The oratorio was being sung in Russian, a banned work during the Soviet era.  This was one of the first recordings in that language.   Listening to words, unknown to me,  made it a wholly new experience.

En route to a holiday dinner years later while listening to the local classical music station, I heard a new CD that was also not in English.  But it was so buoyant, melodic, and festive that I looked up the station’s playlist to find the title of the CD, Karolju.

It is a suite of original Christmas carols for choir and orchestra by the America composer Christopher Rouse. The work was commissioned and first performed on November 7, 1991 by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra

The composer modeled the work and its rhythmic variations after Carl Off’s Carmina Burana.   Here is how the composer explained his unusual choice of language.

As I wished to compose the music first, the problem of texts presented itself. Finding appropriate existing texts to fit already composed music would have been virtually impossible, and as I did not trust my own ability to devise a poetically satisfying text, I decided to compose my own texts in a variety of languages (Latin, Swedish, French, Spanish, Russian, Czech, German, and Italian) which, although making reference to words and phrases appropriate to the Christmas season, would not be intelligibly translatable as complete entities. It was rather my intent to match the sound of the language to the musical style of the carol to which it was applied. I resultantly selected words often more for the quality of their sound and the extent to which such sound typified the language of their origin than for their cognitive “meaning” per se.

Though the music of Karolju is original, the first and tenth movements of the work paraphrase the coda of “O Fortuna” from Carmina Burana. The third movement also quotes a four-measure phrase from The Nutcracker by the Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, which itself dates back to an 18th-century minuet.

This is the link to all of the individual carols on the album.   Many languages are used but to capture the spirit of the season you might open with the Swedish carol #2, for 1:45 minutes.

Enjoy these original sounds of the season’s spirit. Listen as the words, even when not understood, create texture for each musical movement.

Please add your favorite choral sounds at the end of the blog.

 

 

Amid sheepish shepherds,
embarrassed kings, awkward angels
with their bent-coat-hanger wings –
my most unforgettable character
is the tender-hearted lad
assigned to play the innkeeper,
who undid the whole production
when he assured the wandering couple,
“You folks are so, so lucky.
We just had a cancellation.”

by J. Barrie Sheperd