IN MY BRIEF
reflection tonight I would like to let others do most of the talking. This is always wise, I think, but tonight it is especially so given those to whom we’ll be listening. They are three 20th-century poets, roughly contemporaneous with each other, and all deriving from a rather oddly shaped island that has been known under many titles, Albion being my favorite. And they are: W. H. Auden, G. K. Chesterton, and David Jones.
The theme I’ll be tracing across and within a small selection from each of their work, and with an eye toward the feast of the Incarnate birth of the Word of God known to many of us as Christmas, is that of “making strange.” Defamiliarization is the technical literary critical term for this notion of making strange, and it was coined by Viktor Shklovsky of the Russian Formalists (as остранение) around the second decade of the 20th century. Round about the time, in fact, that these three poets were active—though defamiliarization describes a fundamental function of all aesthetic experience, verbal, visual, and otherwise.
When we see a work of art, or read a poem or a story, or even listen to a work of music, somehow the world we knew is re-cast, and we see it, hear it, know it anew, with a difference. If we have eyes to see, and ears to hear (and the artwork is good enough), then what was familiar, becomes strange, enticing, foreign. And when what was known becomes in some sense unknown, then we
must also change if we are to meet and know it once more, whether that change is perceptive or moral or spiritual. In the poetry we’ll encounter this evening, the world is made strange. But in poetry it is also words, our everyday currency, that are made strange; language itself comes to seem an exotic specimen, alive and bursting with unforeseen potential. Like if pennies turned into shekels.
W. H. Auden
I hope this little introduction will prepare us for listening to the works that follow. First up is W. H. Auden’s For the Time Being. Published in 1941-1942, this long work is an oratorio, a dramatic composition intended to be performed musically. Though it never made much of a stage debut, For the Time Being
is no less powerful on the page. Its narrative reenacts various episodes from the Gospel account of Christ’s birth in the first chapters of Matthew and Luke, but with deliberate differences and anachronistic elements. The passage I’ll now read comes near the very end, and describes an experience which, perhaps, is familiar to us. It is a long passage, but well worth the time put in reading it:
Well, so that is that. Now we must dismantle the tree,
Putting the decorations back into their cardboard boxes—
Some have got broken—and carrying them up to the attic.
The holly and the mistletoe must be taken down and burnt,
And the children got ready for school. There are enough
Left-overs to do, warmed-up, for the rest of the week—
Not that we have much appetite, having drunk such a lot,
Stayed up so late, attempted—quite unsuccessfully—
To love all our relatives, and in general
Grossly overestimated our powers. Once again
As in previous years we have seen the actual Vision and failed
To do more than entertain it as an agreeable
Possibility, once again we have sent Him away,
Begging though to remain His disobedient servant,
The promising child who cannot keep His word for long.
The Christmas feast is already a fading memory,
And already the mind begins to be aware
Of an unpleasant whiff of apprehension at the thought
Of Lent and Good Friday which cannot, after all, now
Be very far off. But, for the time being, here we all are,
Back in the moderate Aristotelian city
Of darning and the Eight-Fifteen, where Euclid’s geometry
And Newton’s mechanics would account for our experience,
And the kitchen table exists because I scrub it.
It seems to have shrunk during the holidays. The streets
Are much narrower than we remembered; we had forgotten
The office was as depressing as this. To those who have seen
The Child, however dimly, however incredulously,
The Time Being is, in a sense, the most trying time of all.
For the innocent children who whispered so excitedly
Outside the locked door where they knew the presents to be
Grew up when it opened. Now, recollecting that moment
We can repress the joy, but the guilt remains conscious;
Remembering the stable where for once in our lives
Everything became a You and nothing was an It.
And craving the sensation but ignoring the cause,
We look round for something, no matter what, to inhibit
Our self-reflection, and the obvious thing for that purpose
Would be some great suffering. So, once we have met the Son,
We are tempted ever after to pray to the Father:
“Lead us into temptation and evil for our sake.”
They will come, all right, don’t worry; probably in a form
That we do not expect, and certainly with a force
More dreadful than we can imagine. In the meantime
There are bills to be paid, machines to keep in repair,
Irregular verbs to learn, the Time Being to redeem
From insignificance. The happy morning is over,
The night of agony still to come; the time is noon:
When the Spirit must practise his scales of rejoicing
Without even a hostile audience, and the Soul endure
A silence that is neither for nor against her faith
That God’s Will will be done, that, in spite of her prayers,
God will cheat no one, not even the world of its triumph.
~W. H. Auden, For the Time Being, “The Flight into Egypt,” III
Auden’s words here evoke for us a feeling we all know: the let-down after Christmas. (As an aside, it’s worth remembering that the 12 days of Christmas begin
on Christmas, and that this implies nearly two weeks of uninterrupted celebration after
Christmas, culminating in the feast of Theophany on January 6. But the world has long forgotten this, and does most of its feasting before the feast itself, so that when the long-awaited day arrives, it’s over before it begins). And the reflexive thing about reading Auden here tonight is that we are, in fact, still ourselves in this same period of time; it is December 28th, three days after Christmas. Auden, in other words, writes about something we are currently experiencing. And as we listen to a poem about precisely what we are living, we have that experience distanced from itself, into an object available for reflection or refraction. This would be true at any time, to an extent, but the poignancy of the defamiliarization of the depressingly familiar as something we are both living and reading/listening to, is worth noting.
In the passage, Auden’s diction is as blasé as the sentiments he conveys. The overarching thrust comes early, when the narrator says, “Once again / as in previous years we have seen the actual Vision and failed / to do more than entertain it as an agreeable / possibility.” And later: “To those who have seen / the Child, however dimly, however incredulously, / the Time Being is, in a sense, the most trying time of all.” Defamiliarization is clearly needed. The extraordinary has fallen in among the ordinary, but remains unfelt, unmet. The soul has achieved a certain numbness or callousness to the transformation invited by “the Child.” Making strange, however, is one way “to redeem the time / from insignificance.” Poetry and art play a part in this, as Auden’s poem exemplifies, along with fasting, feasting, and much in between. What will be our response? Not only “remembering the stable”—the mundane—but also seeing the stables, so to speak, around us, where Christ resides and waits for us to find Him? In this way, truly, “everything [becomes] a You and nothing [is] an It.” But it takes work.
G. K. Chesterton
If Auden’s poem ends with an attempt to reinvigorate the days following Christmas, G. K. Chesterton’s poem “The House of Christmas” takes the feast of Christmas itself as something to which we in the modern world have become numb or insensate. As is characteristic of his prose, Chesterton in this poem aims for a re-enchanting defamiliarization that presents a reality well-known—the stable and manger scene of the Nativity as described in Luke 2—but one not without its hazards:
There fared a mother driven forth
Out of an inn to roam;
In the place where she was homeless
All men are at home.
The crazy stable close at hand,
With shaking timber and shifting sand,
Grew a stronger thing to abide and stand
Than the square stones of Rome.
For men are homesick in their homes,
And strangers under the sun,
And they lay on their heads in a foreign land
Whenever the day is done.
Here we have battle and blazing eyes,
And chance and honour and high surprise,
But our homes are under miraculous skies
Where the yule tale was begun.
A Child in a foul stable,
Where the beasts feed and foam;
Only where He was homeless
Are you and I at home;
We have hands that fashion and heads that know,
But our hearts we lost—how long ago!
In a place no chart nor ship can show
Under the sky’s dome.
This world is wild as an old wives’ tale,
And strange the plain things are,
The earth is enough and the air is enough
For our wonder and our war;
But our rest is as far as the fire-drake swings
And our peace is put in impossible things
Where clashed and thundered unthinkable wings
Round an incredible star.
To an open house in the evening
Home shall men come,
To an older place than Eden
And a taller town than Rome.
To the end of the way of the wandering star,
To the things that cannot be and that are,
To the place where God was homeless
And all men are at home.
Certain phrases and terms particularly stand out. For example, while we normally picture a relatively sentimental and docile scene surrounding the manger, in the first stanza we have “the crazy stable...with shaking timber and shifting sand.” And how could a stable be stronger than the stones of Rome? And yet it has proven so. Later, the angelic appearance to the shepherds is described as “impossible things, / where clashed and thundered unthinkable wings / round an incredible star.” Truly enough, the ubiquitous phrase following an angelic appearance is “do not be afraid,” but Chesterton gives us a poetic image that evokes the terrifying reality of what seeing a heavenly host could have been like.
And lastly, and perhaps most centrally to the poem, comes the repeated term “homeless,” to describe both Mary and Christ-God Himself. This particular word, evoking images of vagrant squalor and transience, has a certain deliberate bluntness to it. No romanticization here—but quite a bit of defamiliarization. The cozy crèche has been made strange, and is now an unpredictable and dangerous place, at least for those who would half-hope to remain unchanged by what occurred there.
Chesterton extends this defamiliarization beyond the stable, however, to the world at large, suggesting in the second stanza that “men are homesick in their homes, / and strangers under the sun.” And later he declares that “the world is as wild as an old wives tale, / and strange the plain things are.” What is it that makes them strange? For Chesterton, it is precisely the contingency of creation and the event of Incarnation. First, regarding creation, as Chesterton stresses elsewhere (“The Ethics of Elfland” in Orthodoxy) what is might not have been. The fact that God made something rather than nothing, is the great miracle underneath all miracles. Thus all things have a certain strangeness to them—for they might not have been, after all.
Secondly, this world is, in Lewis’s terms, “the visited planet.” The uncreated Creator has dwelt among his creatures, participating in the finite materiality with an unfathomable proximity: as a helpless child. But such an event bears witness to the deeper truth about even creation itself: that love sustains all things. The Creator God is love; and He shows us this indisputably through His Incarnation.
David Jones
A key consequence of both creation (contingency) and Incarnation, moreover, is that created being bears traces of its Maker and Lord. Material reality has become shot through with the unpredictable if nonetheless partially knowable presence of God. Chesterton’s poem alludes to this, but some lines from a poem by David Jones conveys this in a uniquely visceral idiom:
I said, Ah! what shall I write?
I enquired up and down.
(He’s tricked me before
With his manifold lurking places.)
I looked for His symbol at the door.
I have looked for a long while
at the textures and contours.
I have run a hand over the trivial intersections.
I have journeyed among the dead forms
causation projects from pillar to pylon.
I have tired the eyes of the mind
regarding the colours and lights.
I have felt for His Wounds
in nozzles and containers.
I have wondered for the automatic devices.
I have tested the inane patterns
without prejudice.
I have been on my guard
not to condemn the unfamiliar.
For it easy to miss Him
at the turn of a civilisation.
~David Jones, “A, a, a, Domine Deus”
These lines describe with poetic uncanniness the possible advent of Christ into our daily lives, in unexpected, if sought for, places. It is not a poem so much about the Incarnation itself as about its enduring repercussions. For He has become flesh and dwelt among us—and, though He ascended bodily, He is with us until the end of the world—but in precisely strange, unexpected ways among what is familiar.
Yet (beware!) we must be aware: for it is possible to miss Him, especially “at the turn of a civilisation.” As Jones puts it, “I have been on my guard / not to condemn the unfamiliar.” Indeed, the speaker has “looked for His symbol at the door” and has “felt for His Wounds / in nozzles and containers.” Jones’ poetic imagery achieves the palpable cohabitation of sacred and mundane, hidden and manifest, and presents in these lines something like what Walker Percy’s protagonist in The Moviegoer
calls “the Search.” In defamiliarizing the quotidian as a quest for the King, Jones’ poem makes the world strange through strange words, seeking to recast the reader’s cognizance of the Word Himself as the lodestone of all searching. Eliot, who was instrumental in getting Jones’ poetic work published at Faber & Faber, also reminds us that “the hint half-guessed, the gift half-understood, is Incarnation.”
As promised, I have primarily let others speak tonight about the significant task of making strange the world through defamiliarizing poetic words. The Incarnation is the paradigm for this poetic action: the Word, the Logos and Second Person of the Trinity, made Himself strange by condescending to be born in humble, human form. It was not what people expected, and it required them to change and be transformed. Something like Romans 12:2, perhaps: “do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” But in this case, the renewing of our minds happens, in “the time being,” alongside the renewal of the world. The former through poetry, scripture, prayer, worship, redeeming time from insignificance; the latter, through the redemptive poesis
of God made flesh: “behold, I make all things new” (Rev. 21:5).
*Dr. Gaelan Gilbert
is the Headmaster of Christ the Savior Academy in Wichita, KS. He is also the author of a collection of poems titled One Is Found First.
**Originally delivered at the 11th annual Feast of the Nativity in the Year of Our Lord 2020 in Wichita, KS at The Ladder, headquarters for Eighth Day Institute.
