Christmas with T. S. Eliot

"A Song for Simeon", illustration by E. McKnight Kauffer, 1928; © Faber

By THEA LENARDUZZI

In 1927, Faber & Gwyer, as the publishing house was then known, asked their new employee T. S. Eliot to produce a series of pamphlets, printing new poems by some of the leading lights (including Walter de la Mare, G. K. Chesterton and, albeit on the wane, Thomas Hardy) alongside work by distinguished artists (the Nash brothers, for example, and E. McKnight Kauffer, whose illustration for one of Eliot's own contributions appears above). At that time, Eliot was just resurfacing, not only from ten years in banking, but from his conversion to Anglo-Catholicism. It was only shortly after the first run of pamphlets appeared that Eliot, in a preface to his collection For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on style and order, famously declared himself a “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion”.  (Eliot is not the only literary type to acknowledge a debt to Andrewes; for Kurt Vonnegut, the translator of the King James Bible was “the greatest writer in the English language so far”.)

Eliot’s choice of “Ariel” as a title for the series seems particularly pertinent in this light . . . .

The pamphlets were originally intended for Faber’s clients and business associates, designed, as Alan Jenkins explains in the most recent episode of TLS Voices, “to take the place of Christmas cards and other similar tokens that one sends for remembrance’s sake at certain times of the year”.  Taking Christmas more or less obliquely as his theme, Eliot brought his creativity to bear on one of the most pivotal, and divisive, events in the Christian calendar. “Ariel” is both the symbolic name – meaning “lion of God” – for Jerusalem, and the name of Shakespeare’s neither-good-nor-bad, sexually ambiguous “spirit”.  

If Eliot saw himself as having just arrived at his new faith, he had at the same time only recently departed his previous life as a non-believer. Poised mid-conversion, the speakers of “The Journey of the Magi” and “A Song for Simeon”, two of the poems Eliot contributed to the series in 1927 and 1928 respectively, look forwards and backwards at the same time; these are simultaneously poems of birth and death. This is perhaps nowhere more clear than in the final stanza of “The Journey of the Magi”:

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our palaces, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

While “The Journey of the Magi” draws heavily from the Gospel of Matthew, “A Song for Simeon” borrows from an episode at the end of the Nativity passage in the Gospel of Luke to weave  a dramatic monologue of the repentance and conversion of Simeon, an ageing Jew (“I am tired with my own life and the lives of those after me, / I am dying in my own death and the deaths of those after me”). Both poems represent a shift from the abject bleakness of The Waste Land (a relief, no doubt, for those receiving the pamphlet as, in Eliot’s words, “a kind of Christmas card”), but they carry with them a similar sense of alienation and rootlessness, conveying the partial sight of a conflicted, or flawed seer.

This is the work of a poet still very much in the grip of conversion, for whom Christmas – and the Ariel series –  represented a kind of test. (When Eliot said of the title, “Nobody else seemed to want [it] afterwards”, he couldn’t have known that Sylvia Plath would write a poem of that name – Ariel was the name of her childhood horse – on her birthday in 1962, a few months before committing suicide;  I can think of few poets for whom birth and death were so fused. That the poem went on to give its name to her posthumously published second collection, in 1965, the year of Eliot’s death, seems apt.)

Eliot’s private, spiritual conflict can be seen in the sheer range of the poetry he included in the series, from the near-Hallmark sentimentality  of Laurence Binyon’s “The Wonder Night” (“Now firelight pranks the ceiling / Above each sleepy head, / It warms a hand that's clasping / The new toy hugged in bed, / On hair it flickers golden / And cheeks of rosier red”) to Walter de la Mare’s “Alone” (“The abode of the nightingale is bare, / Flowered frost congeals in the gelid air, / The fox howls from his frozen lair: / Alas, my loved one is gone, / I am alone: / It is winter”).

Perhaps it is the near-schizophrenic nature of Eliot’s selection that gives this series its enduring appeal – indeed, in time for this Christmas, Faber have reissued Eliot's own Ariel poems – there were six over the years, including “The Cultivation of Christmas Trees”, published in a 1954 revival of the series – in a single volume, complete with the original artwork. To state the obvious, Christmas means many things to many people, and often these many things can hit the individual all at once. Taken as a whole, the Ariel series dramatizes the full range of emotions associated with the season – it encapsulates the by turns over- and under- whelming period perfectly.