T.S. Eliot on “The First Coming of the Second Coming”

T.S. Eliot’s Selected Poems comes off the shelf every Christmas for his “Ariel” poems: six poems, the series given the name of the sprite in Shakespeare, that touch on Christmas in one way or another.

I’ve read the poems year after year without knowing how they came about. Now an essay on the Paris Review Daily spells out that the poems were part of a series organized by Eliot’s publisher (and employer), Faber & Gwyer of London, and that “G. K. Chesterton, Thomas Hardy, D. H. Lawrence, Siegfried Sassoon, Vita Sackville-West, Edith Sitwell, and W. B. Yeats all contributed.”

The Ariel series followed a strict formula: identical cardboard bindings; title, illustrator, author, and occasionally an illustration on the cover; and two interior sheets folded to make four pages. The first page repeated the title information; the following three featured the poem and an original illustration.

The essay – by Casey N. Cep, a Harvard graduate and Rhodes scholar now living on Maryland’s Eastern Shore – is about the last and least known of the Ariel poems, one called “The Cultivation of Christmas Trees,” and it is what is called an essay in disguise. The Eliot estate manages copyright tightly – as Peter Ackroyd found out; he wrote a full biography of the poet without quoting the poetry more than a line at a time – so the essayist paraphrases, reflects, recalls, responds, associates, ponders, and suggests her way around the poem.

She lingers over a strong image:

The speaker of the poem yearns to be like “the child / For whom the candle is a star,” the young soul for whom “the gilded angel / Spreading its wings at the summit of the tree / Is not only a decoration, but an angel.” He wants to return not to childishness, but childhood, when “the spirit of wonder” filled whole days, not only fleeting moments. He desires “the glittering rapture, the amazement / Of the first-remembered Christmas Tree.”

She moves between the experience in the poem and our own experience:

“The Cultivation of Christmas Trees” is not about raising evergreens, but curating our own lives. Eliot writes with the hope that “the reverence and the gaiety” of childhood might linger, and “not be forgotten in later experience, / In the bored habituation, the fatigue, the tedium / The awareness of death, [or] the consciousness of failure.”

She points a moral:

The symbolism of evergreen trees predates Christianity, and the Christmas trees of Eliot’s poem have meaning beyond their religiosity. The cultivation in the poem’s title is not really of trees, but of persons. Joy is born naturally, but it requires tending if it is to last.

“We had the experience but missed the meaning,” Eliot wrote in a celebrated passage in Four Quartets, and this Paris Review essayist misses none of the meaning of Eliot’s little-known Christmas poem.

• 21 December 2013
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