{"id":63900,"date":"2013-12-18T15:38:35","date_gmt":"2013-12-18T20:38:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=63900"},"modified":"2013-12-19T10:35:23","modified_gmt":"2013-12-19T15:35:23","slug":"t-%e2%80%89s-eliots-the-cultivation-of-christmas-trees","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2013\/12\/18\/t-%e2%80%89s-eliots-the-cultivation-of-christmas-trees\/","title":{"rendered":"T. S. Eliot\u2019s \u201cThe Cultivation of Christmas Trees\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"T-S-Eliot-Cultivation-600\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In 1927, Richard de la Mare had an idea for some Christmas cards. Because he was a production director at London\u2019s Faber & Gwyer, his cards were festive poetry pamphlets that could be sent to clients and sold to customers for one shilling a piece. Because two years earlier Geoffrey Faber had lured a banker from Lloyd\u2019s Bank to work as an editor at his publishing house, Faber & Gwyer had T. S. Eliot to contribute to the series.<\/p>\n

Named for Shakespeare\u2019s sprite, the Ariel poems each addressed the Christmas holiday or a seasonal theme. 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.<\/p>\n

T. S. Eliot wrote six poems for the series: \u201cThe Journey of the Magi\u201d (1927), \u201cA Song for Simeon\u201d (1928), \u201cAnimula\u201d (1929), \u201cMarina\u201d (1930), \u201cTriumphal March\u201d (1931), and, later when the series was revived, \u201cThe Cultivation of Christmas Trees\u201d (1954). Only thirty-four lines long, that final poem is like a whisper in the whirlwind of dramatic plays and long poems that characterize most of Eliot\u2019s later work. \u201cThe Cultivation of Christmas Trees\u201d came decades after \u201cThe Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock\u201d (1917) and The Waste Land<\/em> (1922), years after Old Possum\u2019s Book of Practical Cats<\/i> (1939) and The Four Quartets<\/i> (1943).<\/p>\n

I think of Eliot\u2019s Christmas trees every year around this time: when firs, pines, and spruces appear in living rooms, storefronts, and town squares around the country. Eliot wrote the poem when he was sixty-six years old. His voice is wizened, yet wistful as he reaches through all the years of his life to recover \u201cthe spirit of wonder\u201d from his earliest Christmases. Though formal and serious, the poem seems almost saccharine when compared to his earlier work. It will surprise many that the poet of fragments and ruins eventually turned his attention to the pretty packages and bright lights of Christmas. <\/p>\n

Eliot had been baptized and confirmed in the Anglican Church in 1927, a profound religious experience recorded in his earlier Ariel poems, most notably \u201cThe Journey of the Magi.\u201d Most of his literary contemporaries did not understand his conversion or the poems that followed and his faith remains divisive for readers and scholars of his work. For many, Eliot\u2019s work was ruined by religion; the young secularist produced better criticism and poetry. For others, even those who aspired to admire his faith, Eliot the believer became too conservative and returned to the anti-Semitism of his youth.<\/p>\n

By 1954, when Eliot wrote \u201cThe Cultivation of Christmas Trees,\u201d the pains of conversion had waned and the poem conveys the hopeful joy of his faith. It was also perfectly illustrated by the Catholic painter and poet David Jones. The poem begins declaratively: \u201cThere are several attitudes towards Christmas,\u201d then promptly rejects all but one of these. The speaker will not waste words on \u201c[t]he social, the torpid, the patently commercial, \/ The rowdy (the pubs being open till midnight) \/ And the childish.\u201d He will not concern himself with those, only with the attitude \u201cof the child.\u201d Eliot borrows the distinction from the Gospels between childishness and the abiding sincerity of children. There is no Saint Nicholas here, only the martyr Saint Lucy and her \u201ccrown of fire.\u201d<\/p>\n

The speaker of the poem yearns to be like \u201cthe child \/ For whom the candle is a star,\u201d the young soul for whom \u201cthe gilded angel \/ Spreading its wings at the summit of the tree \/ Is not only a decoration, but an angel.\u201d He wants to return not to childishness, but childhood, when \u201cthe spirit of wonder\u201d filled whole days, not only fleeting moments. He desires \u201cthe glittering rapture, the amazement \/ Of the first-remembered Christmas Tree.\u201d<\/p>\n

For those who celebrate Christmas religiously or even culturally, the earliest Christmas produces an inventory like the one offered by the poem. Returning to your first Christmas recovers the verdant odor of the tree, the soft pierce of its needles, the colorful paper or popcorn chains wrapped round it like a scarf, all of the ornaments that hook by hook made the tree your own.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Like some fairytale of foliage, every Christmas tree tells a story in a season filled with stories, and Eliot is right to hang his argument about innocence on its branches. \u201cThe Cultivation of Christmas Trees\u201d is not about raising evergreens, but curating our own lives. Eliot writes with the hope that \u201cthe reverence and the gaiety\u201d of childhood might linger, and \u201cnot be forgotten in later experience, \/ In the bored habituation, the fatigue, the tedium \/ The awareness of death, [or] the consciousness of failure.\u201d<\/p>\n

This terrifying litany has always been the center of the poem for me. Eliot captures so many of life\u2019s distractions and duties, which can deaden Christmas and blur all the days that fill our calendars. Experience need not be the end of innocence, yet \u201cbored habituation,\u201d \u201cfatigue,\u201d \u201ctedium,\u201d and \u201cfailure\u201d often are just that. Eliot catalogues all that dulls candles so they no longer burn like stars, everything that clips the wings of angels so they no longer sing on high but sit speechless.<\/p>\n

The poem\u2019s syntax dramatizes this tedium of experience: though four stanzas long, it is only two sentences. The first is compact like a snowball, contained entirely in the first stanza; the second falls like a long, slow snowstorm across the remaining three stanzas. While infant sight is frenetic, age inures our vision, so what the child lives in frenzied lines, the experienced adult belabors in three long stanzas. Eliot\u2019s hope is that \u201caccumulated memories of annual emotion \/ May be concentrated into a great joy,\u201d that we might not be jaded like the final three stanzas, but joyful like the first.<\/p>\n

I return to Eliot\u2019s poem to be reminded of that joy. At Eliot\u2019s invitation, every December I try to remember my first December. I smell logs burning in my family\u2019s woodstoves, their smoky scent mingling with the living odor of a tree my father felled himself, that reached eight feet high, like a redwood into the heights of our log cabin\u2019s cathedral ceiling. I see the beautiful angel that my mother made herself: porcelain head and hands that she shaped and then fired in a friend\u2019s kiln, all joined by a cotton-stuffed fabric body, all covered by a white satin dress. I hear the soft symphony as my sisters woke that angel, strings of bubble lights, and ornaments from their deep sleep between sheets of tissue paper in cardboard boxes.<\/p>\n

I was a child for whom those lights were stars and that angel was more than a decoration. I read \u201cThe Cultivation of Christmas Trees\u201d to remember that what Eliot says was once true for me, and to hope that it might be true again. But December after December my memory fades and \u201cthe spirit of wonder\u201d seems like something traced in the vapor of a breath on a cold windowpane: once visible, but long since disappeared.<\/p>\n

Year after year, tedium finds its way into even this holiday: \u201cthe fatigue\u201d of appointments and meetings; \u201cthe consciousness of failure\u201d in bills unpaid and friends neglected; \u201c[t]he awareness of death\u201d in my mother\u2019s arthritis, my father\u2019s slowing steps, and my own grey hairs. The bubble lights look less like stars; a few of them aren\u2019t even working. The construction paper links on the paper chains are faded and loose. The stained glass I made in preschool is really only bits of cellophane pasted crudely between squares of shiny paper. My parents now have an artificial tree that doesn\u2019t need watering. Even the angel is only a tree topper, a porcelain doll with improbable wings.<\/p>\n

I look back to Eliot\u2019s poem where hope stretches from the first Christmas to \u201cthe eightieth Christmas,\u201d explained in a tender parenthetical: \u201cBy \u2018eightieth\u2019 meaning whichever is last.\u201d Eliot himself would not make it to eighty. He died in January of 1965, having celebrated only seventy-six Christmases. He continued writing criticism, delivering lectures, and even wrote another play, but \u201cThe Cultivation of Christmas Trees\u201d was one of the last poems that he published.<\/p>\n

The poem\u2019s closing couplet reads: \u201cBecause the beginning shall remind us of the end \/ And the first coming of the second coming.\u201d Eliot invokes a distinctly Christian belief about the birth of Jesus and the return of Christ, moving deftly between Christmas, Easter, Pentecost, and the Second Coming, but he also conveys a more universal idea about the bond between life and death. The poem will hold special significance for those who share Eliot\u2019s faith, but its appeal extends beyond those beliefs.<\/p>\n

There are always beginnings and endings, springs and winters, whether those seasons call to mind the heavenly seasons of creation and restoration or only the human seasons of birth and death. The symbolism of evergreen trees predates Christianity, and the Christmas trees of Eliot\u2019s poem have meaning beyond their religiosity. The cultivation in the poem\u2019s title is not really of trees, but of persons. Joy is born naturally, but it requires tending if it is to last.<\/p>\n

If our senescence is to be anything like our infancy, then it will require cultivating a sense of wonder. In appealing to first and lasts, Eliot is, as in the rest of his poetry, at the edge of despair; only in \u201cThe Cultivation of Christmas Trees,\u201d he stands firmly on the side of joy. I love the poem because he invites us to join him, to look again for enchantment and wonder in our lives, to stare at Christmas trees until the electric lights twinkle like stars.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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