A Christmas Oratorio

Somebody at the New Yorker (say, the poetry editor, Paul Muldoon) had the wit to place a poem by the late Seamus Heaney (one of his last?) in the middle of the magazine’s profile of Pope Francis. It’s called “In Time.”

Set there, it reads, to me, on Christmas Day, as something like a song of Simeon (say, Eliot’s): the serene declaration of an old man, near death, that he has seen his salvation, and in time – is seeing it in the life of a child:

Energy, balance, outbreak:

Listening to Bach

I saw you years from now

(More years than I’ll be allowed)

Your toddler wobbles gone

A sure and grown woman.

He notes the sureness of her step on the floor — a stone floor, as I imagine it — which recalls the cement floor of his own childhood. She is just taking to the earth. He is just leaving it.

An oratorio

Would be just the thing for you:

Energy, balance, outbreak

At play for their own sake

But for now we foot it lightly

In time, and silently.

The poem puts in mind all the dance pieces set to Bach, such as Paul Taylor’s Esplanade. A bit of the Christmas Oratorio – led by John Eliot Gardiner – is here.

Merry Christmas.

• 25 December 2013