More Sonnets At Christmas

(1942)

To Denis Devlin

Again the native hour lets down the locks

Uncombed and black, but gray the bobbing beard;

Ten years ago His eyes, fierce shuttlecocks,

Pierced the close net of what I failed: I feared

The belly-cold, the grave-clout, that betrayed

Me dithering in the drift of cordial seas;

Ten years are time enough to be dismayed

By mummy Christ, head crammed between his knees.

Suppose I take an arrogant bomber, stroke

By stroke, up to the frazzled sun to hear

Sun-ghostlings whisper: Yes, the capital yoke—

Remove it and there’s not a ghost to fear

This crucial day, whose decapitate joke

Languidly winds into the inner ear.

The day’s at end and there’s nowhere to go,

Draw to the fire, even this fire is dying;

Get up and once again politely lying

Invite the ladies toward the mistletoe

With greedy eyes that stare like an old crow.

How pleasantly the holly wreaths did hang

And how stuffed Santa did his reindeer clang

Above the golden oaken mantel, years ago!

Then hang this picture for a calendar,

As sheep for goat, and pray most fixedly

For the cold martial progress of your star,

With thoughts of commerce and society,

Well-milked Chinese, Negroes who cannot sing,

The Huns gelded and feeding in a ring.

III

Give me this day a faith not personal

As follows: The American people fully armed

With assurance policies, righteous and harmed,

Battle the world of which they’re not at all.

That lying boy of ten who stood in the hall,

His hat in hand (thus by his father charmed:

“You may be President”), was not alarmed

Nor even left uneasy by his fall.

Nobody said that he could be a plumber,

Carpenter, clerk, bus-driver, bombardier;

Let little boys go into violent slumber,

Aegean squall and squalor where their fear

Is of an enemy in remote oceans

Unstalked by Christ: these are the better notions.

Gay citizen, myself, and thoughtful friend,

Your ghosts are Plato’s Christians in the cave.

Unfix your necks, turn to the door; the nave

Gives back the cheated and light dividend

So long sequestered; now, new-rich, you’ll spend

Flesh for reality inside a stone

Whose light obstruction, like a gossamer bone,

Dead or still living, will not break or bend.

Thus light, your flesh made pale and sinister

And put off like a dog that’s had his day,

You will be Plato’s kept philosopher,

Albino man bleached from the mortal clay,

Mild-mannered, gifted in your master’s ease

While the sun squats upon the waveless seas.

Copyright Credit: Allen Tate, “More Sonnets at Christmas (I-IV)” from The Collected Poems 1919-1976. Copyright © 1960, 1965 by Allen Tate. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC, http://us.macmillan.com/fsg. All rights reserved.

Source: Selected Poems (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1932)