September 2023 Print

The Nativity as Death’s Crucifixion

By Jonathan Wanner

“And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.”~John Donne

Nativity poems are most candid when they are about the crucifixion. Indeed, no story is more full of birth than that of Christ’s death, only you have to cross your eyes to read the tragedy straight. The optical illusion is this: Life Himself was born to be killed, but not to die, since by the cross, death is crucified. As Richard Crashaw puts it, “Death will on this condition be content to die.”¹ For by Christ’s Easter rising, “The grave lies buried.”² There is, in this confounding of life and death, of beginning and end, a certain youthfulness: the words are to be toyed with. It is a game of opposites, not unlike the kind Petruchio plays in the Taming of the Shrew when he answers Kate’s insults with flattery and crosses her pleasures with complaints; or like Romeo and Juliet, in which two families cannot live together, so their children cannot live apart. In each case, contraries are “yoked by violence together,”³ not simply to entertain, but to pave a crossroad between time and eternity. Only by a “commerce of contrary powers”⁴ do Petruchio and Kate finally accord in heart and mind; only by destruction do Romeo and Juliet restore peace between their houses. Oddly, the clashing of contraries brings chaos into harmony, turns hate into self-gift, transmutes death into new life. Though the cross-eyed vision may at first blind us, we see the workings of God’s providence best with crucifixed eyes. For Christ, above all, is the ultimate discordia concors: in Him humanity and divinity, life and death, strength and weakness are tuned to the temper of a cosmic and undivided concord. Indeed, the best poems are paradoxical because Christ is a unity of seeming contradictions, and all the best paradoxes are, in some measure, a descant upon His birth and death.

We find such a descant in Bruce Blunt’s “Bethlehem Down,” sublimely set to music by Peter Warlock (1927). The poem’s central conceit is that the gifts of the magi and Christ’s swaddling clothes prefigure His passion and burial:

When He is King we will give him the King’s gifts,
Myrrh for its sweetness, and gold for a crown,
“Beautiful robes,” said the young girl to Joseph
Fair with her first-born on Bethlehem Down.  

When He is King they will clothe Him in grave-sheets,
Myrrh for embalming, and wood for a crown,
He that lies now in the white arms of Mary
Sleeping so lightly on Bethlehem Down.⁵

Cleverly, the repetition of the mantra “When He is King” in the second stanza baits us into expecting yet another description of Christ’s nativity regalia. We get instead a morbid reversal: the myrrh that adds a sweetness to Christ’s stall will embalm Him, the gold that coronates Him will give way to a crown of thorns, and His swaddling clothes will find a new purpose as burial sheets. As grotesque as these reversions seem, there is an honesty in drawing Christ’s birth close to His death: He was born to die, yet He died to live. As it is a carol, you must sing the poem to love it best—it haunts with a sweetness.

In the same year, T.S. Eliot had an inkling of the same paradox when he wrote the “Journey of the Magi.” As the poem concludes, the wise man is awe-struck not only by the revelation of Christ’s twin-natured birth, but by the birth of the Church which now lives by His death. If, by the sacraments of Christ’s wounded side, death and life agree, then what before were rivaling contraries become a set of agreeable synonyms. So it is that Eliot’s magus cannot distinguish between the two extremes of Christmas and Easter:

Were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different.⁶

When life becomes life-as-death and death becomes death-as-life, we are left with no difference in between. Unsurprisingly, the magus ends with an ironic confession: “I should be glad of another death.”⁷ He, of course, means life.

Even more eager to read Christ’s death into His birth is Richard Crashaw (1613-1649), who salts the theme about his epigrams. In “Blessed be the Paps which Thou Hast Sucked,” he compares the life-sustaining qualities of Mary’s milk with Christ’s blood. As opposed as the two seem (white vs. red, life vs. death, mother vs. son), they share a like purpose: just as Mary nurses the newborn Lord at her side, Christ nourishes her with the sacramental banquet of His spear’s wound:

Supposed he had been Tabled at thy Teats,
Thy hunger feels not what he eats:
He’ll have his Teat ere long (a bloody one).
The Mother then must suck the Son.⁸

Milk, here, is rest-inducing, lily-pure, life-giving; it draws mother and child into an all-embracing closeness. Yet, how much more is Christ’s blood and water our best nurse. In the all-encompassing embrace of His outstretched cross, we find a scarlet purity, a child’s rest.

Crashaw strikes a similar keynote in “Upon our Saviour’s Tombe.” With compact wit, the epigram likens Christ’s virginal birth to His Resurrection. Out of womb and tomb alike, Christ found a mysterious passage, even when the way was shut. The tomb is, thus, “a virgin” like Mary:

How Life and Death in Thee
                         Agree!
Thou had’st a virgin Wombe
                         And Tombe.
And Joseph did betroth
                         Them both.⁹

Crashaw’s pairing of “womb” with “tomb” is itself a little microcosm of Christ’s discordia concors. As emblems of life and death, the words appear to stand in contrary motion, but they ultimately agree both in rhyme and in their life-giving end. The final punchline only adds to the charm: Just as Joseph of Nazareth literally betrothed Mary’s virginal womb, Joseph of Arimathea figuratively “betrothed” Christ’s virginal tomb.

St. Robert Southwell (1561-1595), taking up the Christmas-as-Easter trope as well, adds an unexpected twist in his notorious poem, “The Burning Babe.” On a “hoary winter’s night,” a frost-bitten traveler has a vision of a burning babe who rises above him. Tears fall from the infant’s eyes, though rather than quenching the flames, the drops add fuel to the fire. Amid this flood of sorrow, the babe, who we later discover is Christ, speaks before He is grown. Lecturing the audience about the allegorical dimensions of His newborn body, He teaches us how to read the fiery torments of the cross into the Nativity:

“Alas!” quoth he, “but newly born, in fiery heats I fry,
Yet none approach to warm their hearts or feel my fire but I!
My faultless breast the furnace is, the fuel wounding thorns,
Love is the fire, and sighs the smoke, the ashes shame and scorns;
The fuel Justice layeth on, and Mercy blows the coals,
The metal in this furnace wrought are men’s defiled souls,
For which, as now on fire I am to work them to their good,
So will I melt into a bath to wash them in my blood.”¹⁰

Southwell, here, replaces the more conventional cradle scene with a blacksmith’s shop. Christ’s breast, because it houses the fire of His Sacred Heart, burns with a sacrificial love. As Christ’s Passion remits the debt of our sins, Justice fuels the furnace with a crown of “wounding thorns.” Mercy “blows the coals” not because it is cruel, but because Christ mercifully offers the fire of his agony for the smithing of our “defiled souls.” Immolated in the flames of His Sacred Heart, we are reforged anew, hammered and straightened, until at last the Lord quenches us in His blood, like a blacksmith who, placing a sword into liquid, rapidly cools the metal to strengthen it. Paradoxically, the infant Christ’s body is a crossroad of extremes: fire and water, life and death, justice and mercy. He is blacksmith, furnace, and fuel, all rolled into one. The speaker, however, does not catch the doubled meaning of this riddle until the final couplet, where he liturgically confirms that the babe is indeed the newborn Christ: “With this he [the burning babe] vanish’d out of sight and swiftly shrunk away, / And straight I called unto mind that it was Christmas day.”¹¹ The poem, in the end, is about the Nativity, so naturally it is about the Crucifixion.

As brief as these little poetic clippings are, they function as a sort of cosmic kaleidoscope in which contraries collide to mosaic themselves into a mystic rose. The scope narrows our vision to expand it. It turns our heads upside down even while allowing us to remain standing, and in the reversal, we find the oddness of a forward vision. After all, when self-emptying is self-fulfillment, there is only joy in the grief of living to die. I, of course, mean dying to live.

                                 Rood Song

Lord, find you any lodging? Have you nowhere any room?
A stable for your chapel. For tabernacle–womb.
Your swaddling cloth the corporal, your silken skin the veil.
A manger for your chalice cup, a bleating lamb, the bell.

The stars that crown the heavens, sanctuary candles are.
The shepherd’s oaten reeds, the organ chanted from afar.
Your eyes the lectionary upon which truth is laid.
O little God, O little Babe, through whom the world was made.

The cattle, hear them lowing? Pray you, step up to the trough.
I ask you, have we fodder? No, not hay, but bread enough.
O Lord, I am unworthy–to roof and shelter thee.
Christ be a guest not in my house, yet shall He enter me.

This birth is my beginning, O this infant is my end.
He’s all in all my paradise, here knit in little span.
In gentle sleep suspended, stretched over manger wood
To be our soul’s nativity, Christ cradled on the rood.

Endnotes

¹ Richard Crashaw, “Easter Day,” in The Complete Poetry of Richard Crashaw, ed. George Walton Williams (New York: New York University Press, 1972), 26, line 18.

² Ibid., “Upon the Sepulchre of our Lord,” 26, line 2.

³ Samuel Johnson, “Life of Cowley,” Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, vol. 1 (London, 1781), 29.

⁴ Richard Crashaw, “Hymn in the Glorious Epiphanie,” in The Complete Poetry of Richard Crashaw, ed. George Walton Williams (New York: New York University Press, 1972), 45, line 214.

⁵ Bruce Blunt, “Bethlehem Down,” Daily Telegraph (London), December 24, 1927.

⁶ T.S. Eliot, “Journey of the Magi,” Collected Poems 1909-1962 (New York: Harcourt, 1963), 99, lines 35-38.

⁷ Ibid., line 43.

⁸ Richard Crashaw, “Blessed be the paps which Thou hast sucked,” in The Complete Poetry of Richard Crashaw, ed. George Walton Williams (New York: New York University Press, 1972), 26.

⁹ Ibid., 25.

¹⁰ Robert Southwell, “The Burning Babe,” in The Norton Anthology of Poetry, vol. 4 (New York: WW. Norton & Company, 1996), 206, lines 7-14.

¹¹ Ibid., lines 15-16.