Over the span of centuries, poets, writers, priests and historians, people of faith or of none, have found new ways of hearing one of the world’s oldest stories, finding, perhaps, a little hope, feeling again a wistful wonder, recalling the courage of sainthood along the way.

This from seventh century Britain, a story retold by Rudyard Kipling, in a simple ballad meter and rhyme to fit the tale it tells.

Kipling gives the date AD (what would now be CE) 687. The little chapel still stands in the Sussex marshes, the cool salt wind still blowing off the sea, ‘the windows’ still ‘show(ing) the day’ on the bare white washed walls and worn flagstone floor.

St. Wilfrid (CE 633-709) was a powerful figure in the early English church. He came to Britain to convert the Southern Saxons, and he figures often in The Venerable Bede’s “Ecclesiastical History of the English People” (CE 731), especially in ch. 13 of Bk. 4. St. Wilfrid’s chaplain and biographer Eddi, Eddius Stephanus, was, perhaps, the saint in this story, with his courage and faithfulness in the face of mockery and the dark, wild night.

The poem has been set to music several times and, perhaps most enchanting of all, Kipling gave a typed and signed copy to his friend Isabella Stewart Gardner. It is there in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston to be seen today, or, of course, it can be viewed on Google, the small sheet of yellowed paper with its smudgy old type lending an immediacy to the old story.

In contrast to Brother Eddi in his simple black robe and sandals, St. Wilfrid is portrayed in rich and colorful vestments as befitted his position in the Church, portraits that could have been done by Brother Anselm, the monk illuminator in Anthony Hecht’s poem ‘Illumination.’ This poem in his ‘Florilegium’ series, features the crocus which, as the poem describes, is not native to the British Isles — ‘from sunlit Eden, the palmed and plotted banks/ Of sun-tanned Aden.’ The source of saffron, the crocus also provided a paint used in illuminated manuscripts.

This lovely lyric compacts so much into its short span. From its opening of ‘Ground lapis for the sky, scrolls of gold,’ the ‘Illumination’ unfolds before our eyes,

But to the camel’s-hair tip of the finest brush

Of Brother Anselm, it is the light of dawn,

Gilding the hems, the sleeves, the fluted pleats

Of the antiphonal archangelic choirs

Singing their melismatic pax in terrum.

And then moves to

The child lies cribbed below, in bestial dark,

Pale as the tiny tips of crocuses

That will find their way to the light through drifts of snow.

From that promise of new life, we move to one of wistful questioning, a Nativity scene in the final stanza of Elizabeth Bishop’s travel poem ‘Over 2000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance’ — the title taken from the cover of her old family bible — a poem that the poet John Ashbery calls ‘possibly her masterpiece’ (the New York Times, June 1, 1969). The opening lines set the scene and the tone, ‘Thus should have been our travels:/ serious and engravable.’ Some 60 lines later, every word, as always with Bishop, demanding our full attention, we come to -

Everything only connected by “and” and “and.”

Open the book. (The gilt rubs off the edges

of the pages and pollinates the finger tips.)

Open the heavy book. Why couldn’t we have seen

this old Nativity while we were at it — the dark ajar, the rocks breaking with light,

an undisturbed, unbreathing flame,

colorless, sparkless, freely fed on straw,

and, lulled within, a family with pets,

— and looked and looked our infant sight away.’

This silent mystery of ‘ — the dark ajar’ found in the candlelit interiors, candles with their ‘unbreathing flame,’ are reminiscent of the 17th century French painter George de la Tour. Here, in these paintings, as in Bishop’s words, we find a deep stillness, an unbroken silence. The final line of the stanza, with its repeated ‘ands’ that so perfectly mirror the ‘ands’ of the first line, leaves us with the mystery of the wordless infant, who is the Word.

T. S. Eliot’s ‘Journey of the Magi’ is another poem of questioning, of doubt. Here is the speaker looking back on their journey, not quite able to grasp fully its significance.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,

And I would do it again, but set down

This set down

This: 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; This Birth was

Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.

T.S. Eliot took the first five lines of this poem directly from the 1622 Christmas Sermon of Bishop Lancelot Andrewes. Churchman, scholar and linguist (he knew 15 languages), Bishop Andrewes was one of the chief translators of the King James Bible. For the 17th century poet George Herbert, Lancelot Andrewes was teacher, mentor and friend, his ‘father in God.’ Several of Herbert’s poems, notably ‘The Sacrifice,’ are drawn from Andrewes’ sermons.

Elizabeth Bishop carried a copy of Herbert’s poems with her always. And it is here, with Herbert’s sonnet, the first part of his poem ‘Christmas,’ that we find a change of perspective. It is not the enigma of the Nativity, seen from without, ‘— the dark ajar’ of Bishop, or Eliot’s ‘Then we came to a tavern ... Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver;’ this is not ‘the word/Swaddled with darkness’, but a speaker entering into the inn to find within that ‘glorious, yet contracted light,/ Wrapt in night’s mantle,’

All after pleasures as I rid one day,

My horse and I, both tir’d, body and mind,

With full cry of affections, quite astray,

I took up in the next inn I could find.

There when I came, whom found I but my dear,

My dearest Lord, expecting till the grief

Of pleasures brought me to him, ready there

To be all passengers’ most sweet relief?

O Thou, whose glorious, yet contracted light,

Wrapt in night’s mantle, stole into a manger;

Since my dark soul and brutish is thy right,

To Man of all beasts be not thou a stranger;

Furnish and deck my soul, that thou mayst have

A better lodging than a rack or grave.

But to return to saints and the words of the old Magus, ‘this Birth was/ Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death,’ The late British poet Geoffrey Hill’s lyric ‘Christmas Trees’ is a tribute to, the German theologian and Lutheran pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The title refers to the parachute flares lit by the Allies to guide their bombs, flares which would light up Bonhoeffer’s cell in the Flossenberg concentration camp as he awaited execution.

Bonhoeffer had always known that, by resisting Hitler, he would be called on to lay down his life, as had so many of his family and friends. He was 39 when he was hanged, stripped naked in the freezing air of the pre-dawn, on April 9, 1945. Just two weeks later, on April 23, the 97th Infantry Division of the U.S. Army arrived to liberate Flossenberg, the young Anthony Hecht among its ranks. The horror that confronted him on that and the following days, haunted Hecht for much of his life and he became one of the foremost poets to bear witness to the Holocaust.

Geoffrey Hill’s poem, its strict form of three, rhyming, tetrameter triplets, adding force to the words, just as Bonhoeffer’s writings, still today, ‘encourage(s) our borrowed days/by logic of his sacrifice.’

Against wild reasons of the state

His words are quiet but not too quiet.

We hear too late or not too late.

Antiphonal to Geoffrey Hill’s stylized lyric, is the poem written by Bonhoeffer in the final days of his life, a cry from the heart of a young man facing his own gethsemane moment.

O God early in the morning I cry to you./I cannot do this alone.

He describes himself as full of darkness, feeble of heart, lonely, restless and ends with a plea for his liberty:

Lord, whatever this day may bring,

Your name be praised.

Reading this one has to hope that his God, the God of George Herbert’s Christmas sonnet — ‘To Man of all beasts be not thou a stranger’ — was there with him at the end.

Finally, here is a medieval lyric, translated from the Latin by the English scholar and poet Helen Waddell. It speaks, so quietly, to the words that link us to each other, to our history, our stories, over time, over space, especially at Christmas.

Hrabanus Maurus, Archbishop of Mainz, (776-856)

‘To Eigilus On The Book He Has Written’

No work of men’s hands but the weary years

Besiege and take it, comes its evil day:

The written word alone flouts destiny,

Revives the past and gives the lie to Death.

God’s finger made its furrows in the rock

In letters, when he gave his folk the law.

And things that are, and have been, and may be,

Their secret with the written word abides.’

Belinda de Kay is the emeritus director of Stonington Free Library.