Bottum: Christmas Reruns

The first of our Christmas Reruns ¯writings on the season from our authors through the years.

It’s hardly worth the effort to point out how difficult good sestinas are to write. The poet Dana Gioia has a cruel, funny sestina about how all poetry students, assigned to write one, choose to write their sestinas about how hard it is to write sestinas. But the result is that the difference between good and bad may be larger in the sestina than in nearly any other form of structured verse: When they are good, they are very, very good; and when they are bad, they are awful.

So we were glad to get this sestina, "Advent Windows," for the December 2005 issue of First Things from the science-fiction writer Kevin Andrew Murphy. His idea, he told me, was those old Advent calendars with little windows that opened to show a scene from the season¯five windows opening on five literary winter moments.

Advent Windows

Holy Holle, Mother Winter,

Shakes her eider till it flutters,

Till the ticking frees its feathers,

Drifting, shifting into snowflakes,

Soft as swansdown, slowly falling,

Blanketing the world in whiteness.

Robed in furs of spotless whiteness,

Rapt, the Snow Queen watches winter.

Glacial ice, her mirror, falling,

Shatters into shards: each flutters

Through the air; her splintered snowflakes

Fly, all fletched with freezing feathers.

Fairies paint the panes with feathers,

Frost the frames with hoary whiteness,

Limn the pines and posts with snowflakes,

Weave the world the gown of Winter,

Fragile lace, its frills and flutters

Fixed, all frozen water falling.

Ghosts of past and present falling

In with future float like feathers

Round the miser; each one flutters

Trailing winding-sheets whose whiteness

Rivals that of Old Man Winter,

Swirling, thick as churchyard snowflakes.

Standing stark amidst the snowflakes,

Faint, the Little Matchgirl, falling,

Strikes a match to ward off winter,

Sees it blaze like phoenix feathers,

Green and gold and Hope’s bright whiteness¯

Like a dying moth, it flutters.

Mary rides; her heart still flutters,

Though she does not know of snowflakes

Save a star whose wondrous whiteness

Blazes forth to stop man’s falling,

Heralds Hope like angel feathers

Left within her lap last winter.

Hope still flutters, icons falling,

Six-vaned snowflakes, Heaven’s feathers,

Stars of whiteness lighting winter.

¯Kevin Andrew Murphy