The Turning of the Tide, part 5

So death lay in arrest. But at Bethlehem the bless'd
Nothing greater could be heard
Than a dry wind in the thorn, the cry of the One new-born,
And cattle in stall as they stirred.

The Turning of the Tide, part 4

Heaven danced to it and burned. Such answer was returned
To the hush, the Favete,* the fear
That Earth had sent out; revel, mirth and shout
Descended to her, sphere below sphere.**
Saturn laughed and lost his latter age's frost,
His beard, Niagara-like, unfroze;***
Monsters in the Sun rejoiced; the Inconstant One,
The unwedded Moon,^ forgot her woes.
A shiver of re-birth and deliverance on the Earth
went gliding. Her bonds were released.
Into broken light a breeze rippled and woke the seas,
In the forest it startled every beast.
Capripods fell to dance from Taproban to France,
Leprechauns from Down to Labrador,
In his green Asian dell the Phoenix from his shell
Burst forth and was the Phoenix^^ once more.

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*In religious ritual this has come to mean "keep silence."
**See here for a diagram of the heavenly spheres, with Earth in the middle.
***In medieval astrology (a fascinating subject and one that interested Lewis immensely), Saturn was a melancholy planet, cold and grim.
^The moon, on the other hand, represented a collection of traits from insanity to virginity. Hence "the unwedded and inconstant one."
^^Author Bruce Edwards remarks, "The reviving universe reaches its fever pitch of rebirth in the reigniting of the Phoenix, which functions as a metaphor for Christ."

The Turning of the Tide, part 3

Like a stab at that moment, over Crab and Bowman,
Over Maiden and Lion,* came the shock
Of returning life, the start and burning pang at heart,
Setting Galaxies to tingle and rock;
And the Lords dared to breathe, and swords were sheathed
And a rustling, a relaxing began,
With a rumour and noise of the resuming of joys,
On the nerves of the universe it ran.
Then pulsing into space with delicate, dulcet pace
Came a music, infinitely small
And clear. But it swelled and drew nearer and held
All worlds in the sharpness of its call.
And now divinely deep, and louder, with the sweep
and quiver of inebriating sound,
The vibrant dithyramb shook Libra and the Ram,
The brains of Aquarius spun round;
Such a note as neither Throne nor Potentate** had known
Since the Word first founded the abyss,
But this time it was changed in a mystery, estranged,
A paradox, an ambiguous bliss.***

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*All constellations, but here personified (see also Libra, the Ram, and Aquarius later).
**Members of the traditional angelic hierarchy.
***An allusion, I think, to Ephesians 3:4-10.

The Turning of the Tide, part 2

Salamanders in the Sun that brandish as they run
Tails like the Americas in size*
Were stunned by it and dazed; wondering, they gazed
Up at Earth, misgiving in their eyes.
In Houses and Signs Ousiarchs divine**
Grew pale and questioned what it meant;
Great Galactal lords stood back to back with swords
Half-drawn, awaiting the event,
And a whisper among them passed, 'Is this perhaps the last
Of our story and the glories of our crown?
--The entropy worked out?--The central redoubt
Abandoned? The world-spring running down?
Then they could speak no more. Weakness overbore
Even them. They were as flies in a web,
In their lethargy stone-dumb. The death had almost come;
The tide lay motionless at ebb.

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*Here Lewis begins a catalogue of extraterrestrial beings, most of them taken from medieval cosmology and astrology, and describes how they react to the Incarnation. (This is one of the reasons I love this poem-- Lewis, as usual, takes a wide-sweeping look at his topic that makes us see larger implications than usual.) Anyway. Legendary salamanders, as opposed to real salamanders, were supposed to be at home in the element of fire. So it makes sense that giant salamanders would reside in the sun, the fieriest place we know of.
**Houses and Signs are here "places" in the solar system, as determined on an astrological map; for example, the House of Leo being associated with the constellation Leo. Ousiarchs are celestial rulers in the Neoplatonist conception of the cosmos.

The Turning of the Tide, part 1

This, a piece by CS Lewis, is one of my favorite Christmas poems. I'll be posting it in sections from now till Saturday. It helps to know a little bit about medieval cosmology when you read this, especially the latter half, so I will include a few explanatory notes when we get that far.

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Breathless was the air over Bethlehem. Black and bare
Were the fields; hard as granite the clods;
Hedges stiff with ice; the sedge in the vice
Of the pool, like pointed iron rods.
And the deathly stillness spread from Bethlehem. It was shed
Wider each moment on the land;
Through rampart and wall into camp and into hall
Stole the hush; all tongues were at a stand.
At the Procurator's feast the jocular freedman ceased
His story, and gaped. All were glum
Travellers at their beer in a tavern turned to hear
The landlord; their oracle was dumb.
But the silence flowed forth to the islands and the North
And smoothed the unquiet river bars
And levelled out the waves from their revelling and paved
The sea with cold reflected stars.
Where the Caesar on Palatine sat at ease to sign,
Without anger, signatures of death,
There stole into his room and on his soul a gloom,
And his pen faltered, and his breath.
Then to Carthage and the Gauls, past Parthia and the Falls
Of Nile and Mount Amara it crept;
The romp and war of beast in swamp and jungle ceased,
The forest grew still as though it slept.
So it ran about the girth of the planet. From the Earth
A signal, a warning, went out
And away behind the air. Her neighbours were aware
Of change. They were troubled with a doubt.