Tolkien's Lost Christmas Poem

In 2016, a school principal from Abingdon, Oxfordshire found a long-lost Christmas poem by J.R.R. Tolkien. The poem had been published in a 1936 school magazine. 

I haven't shared very many Advent poems this year, so let's remedy that.

Here, I present: "Noel" by J.R.R. Tolkien

Grim was the world and grey last night:
The moon and stars were fled,
The hall was dark without song or light,
The fires were fallen dead.
The wind in the trees was like to the sea,
And over the mountains’ teeth
It whistled bitter-cold and free,
As a sword leapt from its sheath.

The lord of snows upreared his head;
His mantle long and pale
Upon the bitter blast was spread
And hung o’er hill and dale.
The world was blind, the boughs were bent,
All ways and paths were wild:
Then the veil of cloud apart was rent,
And here was born a Child.

The ancient dome of heaven sheer
Was pricked with distant light;
A star came shining white and clear
Alone above the night.
In the dale of dark in that hour of birth
One voice on a sudden sang:
Then all the bells in Heaven and Earth
Together at midnight rang.

Mary sang in this world below:
They heard her song arise
O’er mist and over mountain snow
To the walls of Paradise,
And the tongue of many bells was stirred
in Heaven’s towers to ring
When the voice of mortal maid was heard,
That was mother of Heaven’s King.

Glad is the world and fair this night
With stars about its head,
And the hall is filled with laughter and light,
And fires are burning red.
The bells of Paradise now ring
With bells of Christendom,
And Gloria, Gloria we will sing
That God on earth is come.

 

"Forever's Start"

On this Christmas Eve Eve, I want to share one final Madeleine L’Engle Advent poem. It’s never made its way onto my blog. I’m not sure why. It’s glorious, and full of the type of mystery that so grabs at my heart during this season. The poem was first published, without a title, in L’Engle’s The Irrational Season. This version, I copied from Miracle on 10th Street. It includes this prelude:

Forever’s Start

The days are growing noticeably shorter; the nights are longer, deeper, colder. Today the sun did not rise as high in the sky as it did yesterday. Tomorrow it will be still lower. At winter solstice the sun will go below the horizon, below the dark. The sun does dies. And then, to our amazement, the Son will rise again.

Come, Lord Jesus, quickly come
In Your fearful innocence.
We fumble in the far-spent night
Far from lovers, friends, and home:
Come in Your naked, newborn might.
Come, Lord Jesus, quickly come;
My heart withers in Your absence.

Come, Lord Jesus, small, enfleshed
Like any human, helpless child.
Come once, come once again, come soon:
The stars in heaven fall, unmeshed;
The sun is dark, blood’s on the moon.
Come, Word who came to us enfleshed,
Come speak in joy untamed and wild.

Come, Thou wholly other, come,
Spoken before words began,
Come and judge Your uttered world
Where You made our flesh your home.
Come, with bolts of lightning hurled,
Come, Thou wholly other, come,
Who came to man by being man.

Come, Lord Jesus, at the end,
Time’s end, my end, forever’s start.
Come in Your flaming, burning power.
Time, like the temple veil, now rend;
Come, shatter every human hour.
Come, Lord Jesus, at the end.
Break, then mend the waiting heart.

"The First Coming"

There is a well-known poem by Madeleine L'Engle entitled "First Coming." I tend to share it every Advent. This year, as I was reading through Miracle on 10th Street, L'Engle's collection of Christmas writings, I stumbled across a similarly named poem: "The First Coming." This poem was first published in WinterSong, which she wrote with Luci Shaw.

Here is "The First Coming," in its Lineage of Expectation debut:

He came
throwing off glory
like fiery suns,
leaving power behind,
leaving the storms of hydrogen clouds,
the still-forming galaxies,
totally vulnerable
as he emptied himself.

She took him in—
into the deepest part of her being;
she contained the tiny Word,
smaller than the smallest
subatomic particle,
growing slowly
from immortality into mortality,
mother and child
together in the greatest act of love
the Maker could give the made.

Together they created
immortality from mortality
How? His father was Who?

He looked like any child
from the vulnerable top
of his tiny skull
to the little curling toes.

The whispered Word made
the sun and stars,
wind and water,
planets and moons, and all of us.
But he left this joy
to be

God With Us!
understanding lowly shepherds
and two old people in the Temple.
Later, three Wise Men—
one from each human race—
came, pondering,
Most of the powerful people
were skeptical at best
God become Son of Man? Nonsense.

Christ will come,
expected or unexpected,
when God is ready,
even while we are loudly demanding
signs and proofs
which close our hearts and minds
to the Wildness of Love.

Word of Love,
enter our hearts
as you entered the virgin’s womb.
Come, Lord Jesus!

 

 

The Absurd and the Divine

When I began this Advent blog in 2009, one of the greatest motivations was to build a space to reflect and share the plethora of Advent poems and quotes I was finding online.

In general, I’m not a big poetry person, but Madeleine L’Engle’s poetry—especially her Advent poetry—is some of my favorite verse. It is at the same time gritty and ethereal, cosmic and humble, vulnerable and sacred. And her prose is the same.

Poetry helps transport us to a mental and emotional space ready for the mystery of Advent. Honestly, who could have thought up a star, some shepherds, and globe-trotting wisemen to herald the arrival of God’s son? It could be fantasy, science fiction, or at the very least magical realism. But no, it is the intentional, precise story that God chose to tell. Poetry helps us open our hands a little wider, to receive the absurd along with the divine.

Here is one of L’Engle’s poems called "The Glory," which I first posted on the second Advent Tuesday in 2009, and recently read in her Christmas anthology, Miracle on 10th Street.

 

"Take Joy" by Fra Giovanni Giocondo

This evening we’ll travel back to 16^th century Italy. In 1513, Franciscan friar, architect, archaeologist and scholar, Fra Giovanni Giocondo, wrote this Christmas prayer “Take Joy” as part of a letter for the Countess Allagia Aldobrandeschi.

I salute you! There is nothing I can give you
which you have not;
but there is much, that while I cannot give,
you can take.
No heaven can come to us
unless our hearts find rest in it today.
Take Heaven.

No peace lies in the future
which is not hidden in this present instant.
Take Peace.

The gloom of the world
is but a shadow,
behind it, yet, within our reach,
is joy.
Take Joy.

And so, at this Christmas time,
I greet you,
with the prayer that for you,
now and forever, the day breaks
and the shadows flee away.

-Fra Giovanni Giocondo

"Remembering That It Happened Once" by Wendell Berry

I have been told time and time again that I should read Wendell Berry. I have yet to crack open a book, but here is one of his Advent poems. It is rich in the pastoral imagery for which he is so well known. Soak it in. Be awed by the simplicity and majesty of Christ coming down to humanity, to a place just like this.

Remembering that it happened once,
We cannot turn away the thought,
As we go out, cold, to our barns
Toward the long night’s end, that we
Ourselves are living in the world
It happened in when it first happened,
That we ourselves, opening a stall
(A latch thrown open countless times
Before), might find them breathing there,
Foreknown: the Child bedded in straw,
The mother kneeling over Him,
The husband standing in belief
He scarcely can believe, in light
That lights them from no source we see,
An April morning’s light, the air
Around them joyful as a choir.
We stand with one hand on the door,
Looking into another world
That is this world, the pale daylight
Coming just as before, our chores
To do, the cattle all awake,
Our own frozen breath hanging
In front of us; and we are here
As we have never been before,
Sighted as not before, our place
Holy, although we knew it not.

- Wendell Berry, from A Timbered Choir

Rejoice and Wonder: Quotes from Madeleine L'Engle

There are ten more days of Advent, so today, I want to share three quotes from Madeleine L'Engle's third Crosswicks Journal, The Irrational Season. L'Engle's Advent poetry was one of the main reasons I began this blog ten years ago. She has a way of taking the twists and turns of human thought and unraveling them to resemble the mysteries of God. I am thankful for the way her mind and heart knew the best words to say.

". . .Christmas evoked in me that response which makes me continue to struggle to understand, with the mind in the heart, the love of God for his creation, a love which expressed itself in the Incarnation.  That tiny, helpless baby whose birth we honor contained the Power behind the universe, helpless, at the mercy of its own creation.”

"When I am able to pray with the mind in the heart, I am joyfully able to affirm the irrationality of Christmas.

As I grow older
I get surer
Man’s heart is colder,
His life no purer.
As I grow steadily
More austere
I come less readily
To Christmas each year.
I can’t keep taking
Without a thought
Forced merrymaking
And presents bought
In crowds jostling.
Alas, there’s naught
In empty wassailing
Where oblivion’s sought.
Oh, I’d be waiting
With quiet fasting
Anticipating
A joy more lasting.
And so I rhyme
With no apology
During this time
of eschatology:
Judgment and warning
Come like thunder.
But now is the hour
When I remember
An infant’s power
On a cold December.
Midnight is dawning
And the birth of wonder."

"Cribb’d, cabined, and confined within the contours of a human infant. The infinite defined by the finite? The Creator of all life thirsty and abandoned? Why would he do such a thing? Aren’t there easier and better ways for God to redeem his fallen creatures?

. . .And yet Christmas is still for me a time of hope, of hope for the courage to love and accept love, a time when I can forget that my Christology is extremely shaky and can rejoice in God’s love. . ."

 

Advent is a thin place. A place where our faith is magnified. A place where we can feel, all the more deeply, 
that love
indeed 
came down.