Paradox and the Babe in the Manger: Richard Crashaw’s 17th c. Christmas Poem
It’s Advent season, and my little daughter has been playing
with her Fisher Price nativity set since we brought it out after Thanksgiving. Images
and figures of Mary, Joseph, and the baby Jesus in a manger are still (thankfully!)
seen on display in homes, in yards, and at churches all around. It’s easy for
us to picture the little baby Jesus asleep on the hay, but as we look at the
typical manger scenes, how often do we think about the paradoxes inherent in
that Incarnation of God’s Son?
There is a beautiful stanza from Richard Crashaw’s 17th
century Christmas poem “In the Holy Nativity of Our Lord God: A Hymn Sung as
by the Shepherds” that grabbed my attention this season as I was listening
to a recent choral rendition of that poem.
In a piece he called “Song of the Shepherds” (2013), Alec Roth set several slightly modified stanzas of Crashaw’s mid-length (105+ lines) poem to music. You can listen to it here, sung by San Diego Pro Arte Voices (a 2018 recording): https://youtu.be/EG-LN5cwor8
And you can follow along with the lyrics on a PDF posted on Alec Roth’s website: http://alecroth.com/assets/Uploads/Docs/Song%20of%20the%20Shepherds.pdf
Roth takes a stanza sung by the “full chorus” in Crashaw’s poem and turns it into a refrain for his beautiful choral piece. Here is the stanza as seen in Crashaw’s original poem (approximately line 80*):
Welcome, all wonders in one sight!
Eternity shut in a span;
Summer in winter; day in night;
Heaven in earth, and God in man.
Great little one, whose all-embracing birth
Lifts earth to heaven, stoops heav’n to earth.
Crashaw’s original Nativity poem, first published in 1646 and revised in 1652, features two shepherds singing with a chorus, similar to an oratorio, such as Handel’s Messiah. Such pastoral poetry was a popular genre at the time, and Crashaw’s shepherds (Tityrus and Thyrsis) are essentially the voices of Bethlehem shepherds from the Luke 2 account of Christ’s birth. Here’s a link to Crashaw’s Nativity poem from Poetry Foundation: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44058/in-the-holy-nativity-of-our-lord
The poem begins, “Come we shepherds,” inviting all their peers to marvel at the birth of “the Mighty Babe” (line 45) and to sing about it, that is, to spread the word about the marvelous sight.
The poem is also replete with dark vs. light imagery, reminiscent of Milton’s “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” published shortly before Crashaw’s poem. Crashaw’s poem emphasizes throughout that the shepherds visit at night and that Christ is the Son/sun bringing day to the darkness. In the opening lines, the shepherds’ “blessed sight / hath met love’s noon in nature’s night” (lines 1-2), presenting us immediately with a paradox of the Incarnation.
God the Son is love and light (“love’s noon”), coming into the world, not only at nighttime, but also in the midst of spiritual darkness (“nature’s night”). Furthermore, the glorious light of the Lord is dimmed by inhabiting the opaque flesh of humankind.
Theologians and poets have long marveled at and even reveled in these paradoxes of the Incarnation: the all-powerful Son of God becoming a helpless babe, the glory of God wrapped in human flesh. “O Thou whose glorious, yet contracted light / Wrapped in night’s mantle stole into a manger,” writes George Herbert in his poem “Christmas” (lines 9-10).** Crashaw might be a convert to Roman Catholicism, while Herbert and Milton are various shades of Protestant, but each of these 17th-century authors appreciates the paradoxes inherent in the Christ child.
This brings me back to the beautiful stanza I mentioned at the outset, highlighted by becoming a refrain in Alec Roth’s choral setting. This is one of three consecutive stanzas sung by the full chorus and beginning with “Welcome.” To whom? The comma suggests a vocative: addressing all the wonders inherent in that one sight of the nativity of Christ. Yet the subsequent stanzas more clearly suggest that this welcome is to the Christ child. HE is “all wonders in one sight!” (line 79).
Now enter the paradoxes again: he is “Eternity shut in a span,” the eternal God living a human lifespan. In a return to the dark vs. light imagery, he is “Summer in winter. Day in night” (line 81). Then the fourth line of the stanza gives us what the Incarnation is: “Heaven in earth, and God in man.”
Next, he is the “Great little one,” possibly more of an oxymoron than a paradox and not quite as evocative as Milton’s image of the swaddled infant Christ like Hercules wrestling serpents in his Nativity Ode (lines 227-8). But “Great little one” also fits with Crashaw’s emphasis on the baby as King, as he uses that particular title (“King”) for the Christ child 3 times in his Nativity poem.
This “Great little one['s] all-embracing birth” (changed to “glorious birth” by Alec Roth) might give some pause: who or what is doing the embracing, and what is being embraced? There seems to be intentional ambiguity here and no space in this blog post to tease it out, but the “all-embracing birth” could be simply referring to the previous line’s theology (“God in man”) and ahead to the conclusion of the sentence: “Lifts earth to heaven, stoops heaven to earth” (line 84). That is, in this birth God the Son is fully embracing both his natures (100% God and 100% human).
I’d like to close with two other, and more witty, paradoxes from Crashaw’s poem, the first about the “cold, and not too cleanly, manger” (line 40):
The Babe whose birth embraves this morn,
Made his own bed ere he was born. (lines 48-49)
This one just points to God the Son as Creator. “All things were made by him,” states John 1:3 (KJV), so that makes the Christ child the original creator of the hay and wood that form his manger bed. (See below for a note on “embrave.”)***
Finally, given that Crashaw’s “In the Holy Nativity of Our Lord God” is “Sung as by the Shepherds,” I shall conclude with a paradox related to the latter:
. . . dread Lamb! whose love must keep
The shepherds more than they the sheep. (lines 101-2)
Giving Christ another of his biblical names, the Lamb of God, Crashaw plays on the shepherds’ occupation as “keeping watch over their flock” (Luke 2:8 KJV). This Lamb will instead “keep” watch over the shepherds (keep them spiritually safe, save them, etc.—see John 17:11, Philippians 4:7, 2 Thessalonians 3:3, Jude 1:24 in the KJV).
Richard Crashaw presents more paradoxes in his poem, and no doubt we can come up with even more related to the entire nativity story, but I hope my introduction to a few of these has inspired you to view through new eyes that manger scene currently decorating your home or your neighbor’s front yard. Can you see “all wonders in [that] one sight”?
* My line numbers come from the Norton Anthology of English Literature. Printed versions of Crashaw’s poem vary in their line numbers, both because two versions (1646 and 1652) of his poem exist and because the Chorus’s echoes (refrains) are not always printed in full.
** See my past blogs on George Herbert’s “Christmas” for more on that two-part short poem:
http://readingtheoldbooks.blogspot.com/2012/12/singing-shepherds-gh-day-24.html
http://readingtheoldbooks.blogspot.com/2012/07/christmas-in-july-gh-day-4.html
http://readingtheoldbooks.blogspot.com/2013/07/under-contract-gh-33.html
*** When I first read “embraves the morn” (~line 51), I thought it must be a typo, right? Indeed, the Norton Critical Edition texts modify this to “embraces the morn.” But a quick look into the Oxford English Dictionary reveals that it’s not a typo. “Embrave” in the late 16th -early 18th century meant to adorn, embellish, or beautify (en+brave, with the older meaning of “brave” as splendid, such as related to one’s finery). By the mid-17th century (1648+), when Crashaw is writing, “embrave” also meant to “render courageous.” I love playing with the ideas here of the Christ child’s birth adorning the dawn or even, in a personified way, rendering the morning more courageous. After all, the one with the power to redeem the world, including the creation, has entered it. Thankfully, the Norton Anthology of English Literature retains the obsolete word “embraves,” with a helpful gloss on the meaning, but even if we look at the variation seen in a few other editions like the Norton Critical Ed., we can find something meaningful in the Christ child embracing the morn, which is echoed in the later “all-embracing birth” of line 83.
