Christmas music time

 No, it's not too early; Christmas is in 20 days now.

So here is one of my favorites: Gustav Holst's setting of Christina Rosetti's poem "In the Bleak Midwinter"

I enjoy Holst anyway - he is one of those late 19th/early 20th century British composers who seems capable of capturing a sense of place or, as here, the quiet of what is essentially a lullaby. And I love Rosetti's words, even if they may be a bit inaccurate (it would not have been "bleak midwinter" in the sense Britons would have known it in Bethlehem, even if we were absolutely sure Christ was born in December). But there's a gentleness and a homeliness (in the British sense as definition 2 over there: a good thing). You can almost imagine a mother singing it to her own children at Christmastime, both to teach them the old, old story, but also, just as a bit of lovely comfort. 

And yet as the poem turns from the quiet scene in the stable, to "Our God, Heaven cannot hold him, nor earth sustain..." you get some intimation of the wildness and the numinousness of all of it.

And then, yet, it turns back to the small and the quiet: "In the bleak midwinter, a stable-place sufficed"

And oh, that last stanza.  That's the one that always gets me and in some moods and at some times I cannot sing it without tearing up:

"What can I give Him, poor as I am?

If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb;

If I were a Wise Man, I would do my part;

 

Yet what I can I give Him: give my heart."

 And I think part of it for me is, yes, especially now, I look at the world and desperately want to do something to make it better, to do good - maybe not just, or perhaps not even mainly - as a gift to the One we celebrate this time of year. And yet, what I can do is so small and so meager and so eaten-up by the larger bad, and yes, I would like to be able to do or give something more tangible as does the unnamed narrator of the poem. 

And yes, I suppose, some have criticized it for being twee or soft or affected or whatever (and some question the theology of "Heaven and Earth shall flee away...." but I always took that to be a reference to "the new Heaven and the new Earth"). But I like it. I like the small quietness of it, and the little homey details of "a breast full of milk" and "a manger full of hay."