A Hoary Christmas-Tide Tradition

Traditions! I never shut up about them, do I?

Indeed, I briefly had a blog called Traditions Traditions Traditions!, which lasted only four posts, but which I sometimes think of reviving.

Well, this blog has its own tradition of posting "The Burning Babe" by Robert Southwell at Christmas. I've just checked and I've done this every year since 2015!

I did a quick search for critical literature on the poem, and discovered that it's inspired a whole book, written by Anne Sweeney and published in 2006. It's titled Robert Southwell: Snow in Arcadia: Redrawing the English Landscape 1586-1595.

Here's how it begins:

‘The Burning Babe’ is probably the only poem most readers will know of Robert Southwell’s. I recall reading it as a child; it seemed pleasantly atmospheric to a childish imagination, the holy Babe appearing like a bright bauble against the dark of a snowy English Christmas evening. It is homely, yet cryptic in the Elizabethan style, and blessedly short, a silly sentimental thing that manages, apparently on these merits, to make its way into most anthologies of the English poetic canon. It came as something of a shock to me as an undergraduate to learn that Ben Jonson, with his reputation as a hard man of letters, had singled out this bagatelle for admiration – indeed, he wished he himself had written it; there can be no greater possible encomium from a great ego. What did he admire in it? There have been some fine commentaries on Robert Southwell’s life and work, but none of them has explained to my satisfaction why a man like Jonson would have admired this poem so. This book is an attempt to answer that question.

A "bagatelle", really? Presumably Sweeney is provocative in her choice of words, and she doubtless revised her estimation of "The Burning Babe" if she wrote an entire book on the subject. (I guess I'll find out, since I've put the book next on my reading list.)

Anyway, decide for yourself. Here it is:

As I in hoary winter’s night stood shivering in the snow,
Surpris’d I was with sudden heat which made my heart to glow;
And lifting up a fearful eye to view what fire was near,
A pretty Babe all burning bright did in the air appear;
Who, scorched with excessive heat, such floods of tears did shed
As though his floods should quench his flames which with his tears were fed.
“Alas!” quoth he, “but newly born, in fiery heats I fry,
Yet none approach to warm their hearts or feel my fire but I!
My faultless breast the furnace is, the fuel wounding thorns,
Love is the fire, and sighs the smoke, the ashes shame and scorns;
The fuel Justice layeth on, and Mercy blows the coals,
The metal in this furnace wrought are men’s defiled souls,
For which, as now on fire I am to work them to their good,
So will I melt into a bath to wash them in my blood.”
With this he vanish’d out of sight and swiftly shrunk away,
And straight I called unto mind that it was Christmas day.

And here is a fine spoken rendition of the poem, by a chap who modestly refrains from giving his name.