Like the rest of his many fans, I look forward eagerly to publication of the latest poems of everyone’s favourite troubadour. We have not met, but we have corresponded when he allowed me to quote from The Green Man in the guide to St Peter’s Church, Hurstbourne Tarrant. And it pleases me, partly for the sake of symmetry, but chiefly for Malcolm Guite’s fresh insights, to complete the cycle of birth, death and renewal afforded by reading The Green Man and this new book together.

The Revd Malcolm Guite puts it like this in the introduction:

“Advent falls in winter, at the end of the year, in the dark and cold, but its focus is on the coming of light and life, when the Ancient of Days becomes a young child and says, ‘Behold, I make all things new.’  Perhaps only poetry can help us fathom the depths and inhabit the tensions of these paradoxes”.

We begin, appropriately, on Advent Sunday, with Christina Rossetti’s poem of that name. Poems for every day follow, right up until 6 January, with William Blake’s The Divine Image. Each page provides a new insight by perhaps the greatest living poet with a Christian sensibility, so, although you will know many of the poems already (including one or two of Malcolm Guite’s own), each page is also a journey of discovery.

Between the first and the second coming, says Guite, “there are many other advents…in our encounters with the poor and the stranger, in the mystery of the sacraments, in those unexpected moments of transfiguration surely there is also an advent and Christ comes to us. Perhaps that is why the other sense we have of the word ‘advent’ is to find it beginning the word ‘adventure’. The knights in Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur say to one another, ‘Let us take the adventure that God sends us’, recognizing that the God in whom we live and move and have our being may come and meet us when and where he pleases, and any door we open may be the door to the ‘chapel perilous’. God may send the adventure, but you will find a door to it through Malcolm Guite and this book.

§§§§§§§§§§

10 December

(pp 40-42)

In drear nighted December John Keats

In drear-nighted December,
Too happy, happy tree,
Thy branches ne’er remember
Their green felicity:
The north cannot undo them
With a sleety whistle through them;
Nor frozen thawings glue them
From budding at the prime.

In drear-nighted December,
Too happy, happy brook,
Thy bubblings ne’er remember
Apollo’s summer look;
But with a sweet forgetting,
They stay their crystal fretting,
Never, never petting
About the frozen time.

Ah! would ’twere so with many
A gentle girl and boy!
But were there ever any
Writhed not at passed joy?
The feel of not to feel it,
When there is none to heal it
Nor numbed sense to steel it,
Was never said in rhyme.

…Keats’ felicitous phrase ‘drear nighted December’, sums up the way many people feel in the dreary darkness of encroaching winter. But, much as I love his poetry, I think in this case Keats is wrong about the tree. Indeed it is just because those bleak, rain-lashed December branches do ‘remember their green felicity’, and retain, hidden within themselves, the patterns and energy of their former green-ness, that they will unfold into leaf again in spring and be able, as Larkin said, of trees in May, to ‘begin afresh, afresh, afresh’.

It can be the same with us: we manage to get through the winter, and also perhaps the severer seasons of the heart, because we carry the memories of spring; we are sustained by a kind of parley between memory and hope. So George Herbert, trying to cope with severe experiences of depression and loss, writes in his poem ‘The Flower‘:

Who would have thought my shrivel’d heart
Could have recover’d greennesse? It was gone
Quite under ground; as flowers depart
To see their mother-root, when they have blown;
Where they together
All the hard weather,
Dead to the world, keep house unknown.

But Herbert knew, even in the depths of winter, that

Grief melts away
Like snow in May,
As if there were no such cold thing.

And so in that great poem of recovery he writes:

And now in age I bud again,
After so many deaths I live…

And what about us? We too, in ‘drear nighted December’, need to remember our ‘green felicity’, and surely that is just what we do in Advent, and in the whole approach to and celebration of Christmas. In the darkest time of the year Christ, the life within us and the seed of light, is sown. The root of Jesse, the stock of that true vine from which we all spring, is planted in our hearts, just when our hearts may feel at their darkest and most ploughed up. So through the dark days of Advent I pray for him to come so deeply and quietly into our hearts that, as Lancelot Andrewes said, ‘He may with one word make all green again’.

Waiting On The Word: A poem a day for Advent, Christmas and Epiphany

is published by Canterbury Press on 31 August 2015, but advance copies are available.

Author(s): Malcolm Guite

ISBN-13: 9781848258006

For every day from Advent Sunday to Christmas Day and beyond, the bestselling poet Malcolm Guite chooses a favourite poem from across the Christian spiritual and English literary traditions and offers incisive seasonal reflections on it. A scholar of poetry as well as a renowned poet himself, his knowledge is deep and wide and he offers readers a soul-food feast for Advent.

Among the classic writers he includes are: George Herbert, John Donne, Milton, Tennyson,and Christina Rossetti,as well as contemporary poets like Scott Cairns, Luci Shaw, and Grevel Lindop. He also includes a selection of his own highly praised work.

Author Information

Malcolm Guite

Malcolm Guite is Chaplain of Girton College, Cambridge. A performance poet and singer/songwriter, he lectures widely on poetry and theology in Britain and the US and has a large following on his website, www.malcolmguite.wordpress.com.