A Christmas Hymn

For many years, when we traveled from Rhode Island to Pennsylvania to visit our families during the Christmas holidays, we passed through Middletown, Connecticut, home of Wesleyan University. There isn’t much to it that’s Wesleyan, not anymore, though it does appear that the school has plenty of chaplains, and you can find, if you dig a little in their advertisements on line, that they list the various churches and other places of worship in the neighborhood, along with several religious clubs. But if you went back to the year 1958, you’d have found one of the professors, the poet Richard Wilbur, composing our Poem of the Week, “A Christmas Hymn,” for the yearly Christmas concert. Wilbur was in fact a Christian believer, and much of his poetry is devoted to the faith. That might have made him stand out among the celebrated American poets of his day, but it wouldn’t have made him stand out among professors and students at Wesleyan, not then. I can’t help wondering what it was like — that slice of New England life, in the year before I was born.

Wilbur takes his inspiration from the words of Jesus, when he was entering Jerusalem at the beginning of that fateful and sacred week, and the people hailed him, laying palm branches before him and crying out, “Blessed be the king who comes in the name of the Lord!” Then the Pharisees appealed to Jesus, asking him to make the people be quiet, but Jesus said, “I tell you, if these should hold their peace, the stones would immediately cry out.” And we may remember, too, that when the disciples tried to play the tour guide with Jesus, remarking upon the grandeur of the Temple and its precincts, Jesus, who loved the Temple dearly from when he was a boy, said that there would soon come a time when not one stone would be left upon a stone.

But which stones should testify to the Lord, who came among us as a little child? The stones of the road into the great city? The stones of its walls, and of the Temple? George Herbert, whose poetry Wilbur knew very well, has this to say to God, in “The Altar”: “A heart alone / Is such a stone / As nothing but / Thy power doth cut.” We are the stones that must be roused to life; we are the stones that must be fitted into the new Temple, living, and crying out our praise to God for the great gift of Himself. For the worlds of heaven and earth had been at strife, and man too had been divided from man, but God came to dwell among us in the flesh, God stole into our stony world, and therefore may the stones, as Wilbur says, “look up,” while all the stars look down. And heaven is once again wedded to earth, for the old order has passed away, and the new creation has begun.

“The destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem,” Nikolai Ge. Public Domain.

 A stable lamp is lighted
   Whose glow shall wake the sky;
      The stars shall bend their voices,
   And every stone shall cry.
   And every stone shall cry,
      And straw like gold shall shine;
         A barn shall harbor heaven,
      A stall become a shrine.

 This child through David’s city
   Shall ride in triumph by;
      The palm shall strew its branches,
   And every stone shall cry.
   And every stone shall cry,
      Though heavy, dull, and dumb,
         And lie within the roadway
   To pave his kingdom come.

 Yet he shall be forsaken,
   And yielded up to die;
      The sky shall groan and darken,
   And every stone shall cry.
   And every stone shall cry
      For stony hearts of men:
         God’s blood upon the spearhead,
   God’s love refused again.

 But now, as at the ending,
   The low is lifted high;
      The stars shall bend their voices,
   And every stone shall cry.
   And every stone shall cry
      In praises of the child
         By whose descent among us
   The worlds are reconciled.

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Word & Song is an online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. We publish six essays each week, on words, classic hymn, poems, films, and popular songs, as well a weekly podcast, alternately Poetry Aloud or Anthony Esolen Speaks. To support this project, please join us as a free or paid subscriber.

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