The Galli Report: 12.24.20
Best Christmas poems and "The Second Coming."
The Best of Christmas Poetry
Time to practice what I preach—that is, spending less time consuming news and commentary. Instead, this week I’d encourage you to check out well-known Christmas poems.
Let me offer one of my favorites, though, it’s not a traditional Christmas poem, more of an advent poem really. To be fair, Willam Butler Yeats didn’t write “The Second Coming” to celebrate advent; he wrote it after witnessing the horrors of World War 1, the Spanish Flu, and a host of other trends that made him deeply pessimistic about the future. Many commentators believe the poem is thoroughly grounded in despair, but I beg to differ.
First, if one were truly despairing, why even bother to write a poem about that? What would be the point? One only produces such art if one hopes against hope that it will make some difference. It is strangely cathartic to read about a beautiful description of our miserable state of affairs: e.g. Ecclesiastes.
Second, Yeats seems to look forward only to a horrific apocalypse, and from a Christian point of view, he is partly right. For the judgment is fearsome in one respect, as fearsome as the Crucifixion. But of course, the same Christian faith encourages us to look forward to Jesus’ second coming because, in the end, mercy will triumph.
And thus my reasons for thinking this poem both realistic and hopeful--and appropriate for Advent, when we remember Christ’s first coming and look forward to his second.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Have a blessed Christmas.
Mark Galli
P.S. You will NOT receive a Galli Report on Friday, January 1. You even get a Sabbath from me….