In the Bleak Midwinter
Behold a little child, a boy. He has only a few words yet, but within the wondrous dome of his head, tousled with a wisp of wild hair, a whole world is coming into being. Sometimes he regards things with a settled seriousness, as if he were a metaphysical scholar, batting a toy swing back and forth, investigating the principles of motion. Sometimes he crouches down to the earth to make finger-marks in the soil. Sometimes he gazes into the eyes of a stranger, and breaks into a smile, the two teeth on the bottom making him look a little like a rakish old man who has just downed a swig of cider.
If we knew, in advance, that the child would “amount to nothing,” as we say in our ruthlessness—that he would be the first dumped overboard in the surreality television show of modern life, the first sent packing with his half a talent—indeed, if we knew he would die before the age of reason, should that not make him all the more precious in our eyes? The good of the child is beyond quantity; it is like the good of love, and beauty.
Do we understand that? I don’t know. A hedonistic world is, at base, cruel, pitiless. That is because sensual pleasure can be calibrated. It raises the horrible questions, “How much?” and “How many?” Egotistical pleasure, for which many of us, worshiping a Higher Hedonism, sacrifice the sensual, can also be measured. Larry is the youngest partner in Dewey, Cheatham, and Howe. Linda has two Master’s degrees in Personnel Management. In such a world the child may be a “lifestyle accessory,” to use the inhuman patois, but is otherwise an embarrassment to be managed, or an irrelevance.
And yet our Lord says, “Unless you become as little children, you shall not enter the kingdom of God.” The child must receive all things as gifts, because on his own he can do nothing. Yet the child is also in himself a gift of incomparable beauty, a grace that takes the breath away. We come to Jesus, then, with the poverty and the dignity of children, and he meets us, on the feast of Christmas, in the same way. What cheer for the heart! All the gears of the world grind on, the smokestacks belch and the politicians speak, scientists distill medicines and poisons, producers produce and consumers consume, but the true world is here, at the side of the Christ child, in stillness and joy.
That is the insight of Christina Rossetti’s hymn, “In the Bleak Midwinter.” It is nonsense to suggest that the verses are sentimental. The poet sees the emptiness of a world without Christ. The month of his birth does not matter. If it was July, it was winter—man’s winter, the world’s winter:
In the bleak midwinter,
Frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow,
Snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter,
Long ago.
The childlike irregularity of the meter should not deceive us. Miss Rossetti knows what she is doing. The repetition of “snow on snow,”like the quiet fall of snow on a windless day, suggests the cold of the world, inexorable, deaf to appeal. Nothing changes, nothing can change, until the Word is made flesh, and dwells among us.
This happens because God is too great for greatness; he is the Lord who will come in majesty, and who came, long ago, in the royal flesh of a little child; he is at once beyond the world’s imagining, and beneath the world’s notice:
Our God, heaven cannot hold him,
Nor earth sustain;
Heaven and earth shall welcome him
When he comes to reign.
In the bleak midwinter
A stable-place sufficed
The Lord God incarnate,
Jesus Christ.
Never has the name of the Lord been so tenderly and beautifully uttered in a poem. He is the little boy, named Jesus by his mother, and a stable suffices to house him at his birth; and he is the Christ, the Son of God, who rules at the right hand of the Father. His name itself embraces the whole mystery of our faith. It is the truth. The line needs no more.
The next verse, too, brings together the grand and the small, the mighty and the intimate:
Anthony Esolen is Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Thales College and the author of over 30 books, including Real Music: A Guide to the Timeless Hymns of the Church (Tan, with a CD), Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture (Regnery), and The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord (Ignatius). He has also translated Dante’s Divine Comedy (Random House) and, with his wife Debra, publishes the web magazine Word and Song (anthonyesolen.substack.com). He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
A Journal of Mere Christianity—Delivered to Your Door
- Essays on theology, culture, and the Church
- Contributors from across the Christian traditions
Subscribe (Print + Online) 
Six print issues (one year) of Touchstone, plus full online access and PDF downloads for only $39.95.
Subscribe (Online Only) 
Get a one-year full-access subscription to the Touchstone online archives for only $19.95.
bulk subscriptions
Order Touchstone subscriptions in bulk and save $10 per sub! Each subscription includes 6 issues of Touchstone plus full online access to touchstonemag.com—including archives, videos, and pdf downloads of recent issues for only $29.95 each! Great for churches or study groups.
Transactions will be processed on a secure server.
more from the online archives
31.5—September/October 2018
on the Congregation as a Wilderness by Paul Gregory Alms
32.2—March/April 2019
Finding Him Again Through the Patriarchal Group by Anthony Esolen
20.6—July/August 2007
The Beowulf Poet Was a Shrewd Christian Apologist by Douglas Wilson
calling all readers
Please Donate
"There are magazines worth reading but few worth saving . . . Touchstone is just such a magazine."
—Alice von Hildebrand"Here we do not concede one square millimeter of territory to falsehood, folly, contemporary sentimentality, or fashion. We speak the truth, and let God be our judge. . . . Touchstone is the one committedly Christian conservative journal."
Support Touchstone
—Anthony Esolen, Touchstone senior editor
