Poem
By Stanza VII, nature stands back, and Christ's birth causes the sun to refuse to take its place:
- And though the shady gloom
- Had given day her room,
- The Sun himself withheld his wonted speed
- And hid his head for shame,
- As his inferior flame;
- He saw a greater sun appear
- Than his bright throne, or burning axle-tree could bear (lines 77–84)
The poem transitions into The Hymn for a new set of stanzas. Christ's role, even as a baby, is apparent and made clear within Stanzas XV and XVI:
- Yea Truth and Justice then
- Will down return to men
- ...
- And Heav'n as at some festival,
- Will open wide the gates of her high palace hall.
- But wisest Fate says no,
- This must not yet be so,
- The babe lies yet in smiling infancy,
- That on the bitter cross
- Must redeem our loss;
- So both himself and us to glorify; (lines 141–142, 147–154)
Read more about this topic: On The Morning Of Christ's Nativity
Famous quotes containing the word poem:
“A poem ... begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.... It finds the thought and the thought finds the words.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“A poem is one undivided, unimpeded expression fallen ripe into literature, and it is undividedly and unimpededly received by those for whom it was matured.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Stir of time, the sequence
returning upon itself, branching
a new way. To suffer, pains, hope.
The attention
lives in it as a poem lives or a song
going under the skin of memory.”
—Denise Levertov (b. 1923)