The Nativity

 

 

     

The Nativity

 
Unfold thy face, unmaske thy ray,
Shine forth, bright Sunne, double the day.
Let no malignant misty fume,
Nor foggy vapour, once presume
To interpose thy perfect sight
This day, which makes us love thy light
For ever better, that we could
That blessèd object once behold,
Which is both the circumference,
And center of all excellence:
Or rather neither, but a treasure
Unconfinèd without measure,
Whose center and circumference,
Including all preheminence,
Excluding nothing but defect,
And infinite in each respect,
Is equally both here and there,
And now and then and every where,
And alwaies, one, himselfe, the same,
A beeing farre above a name.
Draw neer then, and freely poure
Forth all thy light into that houre,
Which was crownèd with his birth,
And made heaven envy earth.
Let not his birth-day clouded be,
By whom thou shinest, and we see.

 

Christopher Harvey 

Reading this poem is like opening a treasure chest in a forgotten room and finding the light of the 16th century shining out of it.

Time melts, barriers dissolve, Christopher Harvey speaks.

The brightness of his words! 

I love the lines - "that object at once the center and the circumference of all excellence, Or rather neither, but a treasure unconfined without measure..."  Attempting to describe the superlative nature of God, he then has to retract, realizing his scope is too small.

(And isn't that still the problem? The marvel being too big, and our imaginations not widewild enough, even five centuries later.)

And this - "By whom thou shinest, and we see." A reminder of the mysterious quality of light itself - we see light, and by it we see. Psalm 36:9 says, For with you is the fountain of life; in your light we see light." Jesus Christ, the sun and subject of this poem, calls himself "the Light of the world". Light as a metaphor for knowledge, for clarity, for joy, for the  manifestation of beauty, for guidance, for the means of growth, for warmth, for comfort. Jesus is the living, breathing, walking embodiment of all these.

As the poet-prophet Isaiah wrote, "The people who walked in darkness have seen a great Light."

Centuries later, Christopher Harvey's words still echo that hope.

"Shine forth, bright Sunne, double the day!"

Laurentian Shield

            

A. J. Casson

      

Laurentian Shield

Hidden in wonder and snow, or sudden with summer,
This land stares at the sun in a huge silence
Endlessly repeating something we cannot hear.
Inarticulate, arctic,
Not written on by history, empty as paper,
It leans away from the world with songs in its lakes
Older than love, and lost in the miles.

This waiting is wanting.
It will choose its language
When it has chosen its technic,
A tongue to shape the vowels of its productivity. A language of flesh and of roses.

Now there are pre-words,
Cabin syllables,
Nouns of settlement
Slowly forming, with steel syntax,
The long sentence of its exploitation.

The first cry was the hunter, hungry for fur,
And the digger for gold, nomad, no-man, a particle;
Then the bold commands of monopolies, big with machines,
Carving their kingdoms out of the public wealth;
And now the drone of the plane, scouting the ice,
Fills all the emptiness with neighbourhood
And links our future over the vanished pole.

But a deeper note is sounding, heard in the mines,
The scattered camps and the mills, a language of life,
And what will be written in the full culture of occupation
Will come, presently, tomorrow,
From millions whose hands can turn this rock into children.

F.R. Scott 

And land is a language.

I want to argue with this poem. Is the land really "not written upon by history"?  What is writing? What is language? What is history?

Is the land really empty as paper?

"Now there is pre-words/cabin syllables"

I like that image, of an alphabet and then a language forming, that's appealing, clever.

But the land is forming "a long sentence of it's exploitation"?

What is exploitation?

Is a tree exploiting the ground? Is a bird exploiting a flower seedhead?

Is a moose exploiting waterweeds?

Or are only humans capable of exploitation?

What is "the full culture of occupation"?

Isn't the world without an abundance of all life, dead?

Everything about nature is good and about humans, bad?

But who fills the paper with the poem if not the human?

I love this poem, at the same time I want to argue with it.