Fourth Week of Advent (2024): T.S. Eliot's Ariel Poems

At Mass on each Sunday of Advent, many parishes light a new candle on the Advent Crown. This year, Five Books for Catholics is doing something similar. Each week it recommends a book for the season and delves into it. You may also want to check out last year’s recommended readings for Christmas and Advent.

This week’s recommended reading is the Ariel Poems by T.S. Eliot (1888-1865).

On each week of Advent, a title on Christmas has been recommended: a book on spirituality, one on Christmas art, and a piece of classical music. To round off, this week’s edition proposes a work of literature.

This year there is a further reason to add some literature to our Christmas reading list. Recently, Pope Francis has encouraged the reading of literature as a formative exercise of Christian life.

During his Jesuit formation, Pope Francis spent a period teaching literature in a school. In his Letter on the Role of Literature in Formation he draws on that experience.

Reading great works of literature enriches and forms us in multiple ways, he notes. It helps us disconnect from the unending flux of distractions with which our devices bombard us. It heightens our capacity for silence, reflection and listening. It improves our communication skills, sharpens our mind, stimulates our imagination. It can help us gain a deeper understanding of the human condition, the mysteries of life, contemporary society, and other cultures.

The Christmas break affords an occasion to put Pope Francis’s exhortation into practice, ideally with a work that is set at Christmas

It is not too hard to find such a work. Most, however, extol altruism, not true religion. They celebrate “the season of goodwill” rather than probe the mystery of the Incarnation.

One work that is centred on the Incarnation is T.S. Eliot’s Ariel Poems, one of the great modernist poet's lesser known collections.

This collection of Christmas poems takes its title from the book series in which each verse was originally published.

The Ariel Poems was a series of booklets published by Faber and Gwyer (later Faber and Faber). The booklets were meant to be a more sophisticated Christmas card. Each was an elegantly designed first edition of a previously unpublished verse by a major poet. Naturally, the poem published was often about Christmas. The booklet also contained especially commissioned illustrations.

The first series of Ariel Poems (1927-1931) ran to thirty-eight booklets and featured previously unpublished verse by authors such as Roy Campbell, G. K. Chesterton, Thomas Hardy, and D.H. Lawrence. The second series (1954) ran to only eight.

Eliot was an editor at Faber and Gwyer and wrote a poem for six of the booklets: “The Journey of the Magi” (1927), “A Song for Simeon” (1928), “Animula” (1929), “Marina” (1930), “Triumphal March” (1931), and “The Cultivation of Christmas Trees” (1954). In his Collected Poems, 1909-1962, he placed five of them, arranged in chronological order, in the collection titled Ariel Poems. “Triumphal March,” with its evocation of World War I, was moved to the Corolian collection, no doubt on account of its many references to Shakespeare’s Coriolanus.

“Triumphal March” is a fine sample of Eliot’s modernism and peculiar style. It is full of cryptic allusions and literary references. For this reason, it is worth reading in an edition with notes, such as The Poems of T. S. Eliot: Volume I. It switches between past and present, the mythic and the mundane, and even difference voices. For these reasons, it requires repeated attentive reading.

In his interpretative study,T.S. Eliot’s Christmas Poems: An Essay in Writing-as-Reading and Other “Impossible Unions” , G. Douglas Atkins has argued that “Triumphal March” is also a Christmas poem and belongs to the Ariel Poems.

“Triumphal March” does reference the Incarnation, especially toward the end, where it evokes the Nicene Creed’s article on the Son’s eternal procession from the Father as “light from light”. However, its connection to Christmas is less prominent. That may be why Eliot placed in in Coriolan rather than Ariel Poems.

Significantly, the first of the Ariel Poems was written in the year that Eliot was baptised into the Church of England. His conversion marked a change in his writing. From them on Christian themes took centre-stage in his major poems, such as “Ash Wednesday” (1927) and Four Quartets (1936-1942), and in some of his plays, such as Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and The Cocktail Party (1943). The Ariel Poems are a case in point.

The first two Ariel Poems have a straightforward biblical and liturgical setting.

In “The Journey of the Magi,” one of the wise men recalls the arduous journey to Bethlehem and reflects on how, in Jesus and his disciples, there is a paradoxical confluence of birth and death. This is a central theme in the poems. It resurfaces in a “A Song for Simeon.” In this poem, we move from the Feast of Epiphany (6 January) to the Presentation of the Lord in the Temple (2 February). As the title suggests, the poem is a reimagining of the Nunc dimittis (Luke 2:29-32). It probes how Simeon may have felt upon finally seeing the Redeemer.

The Christmas setting of the next two poems is not so evident.

“Animula” (i.e. little soul) takes its title from the verse that, according to the Historia Augusta, the dying Hadrian addressed to his soul. The poem describes how the soul develops through the stages of life, from childhood, when it takes pleasure “(i)n the fragrant brilliance of the Christmas tree,” to “the silence after the viaticum.” It ends with a variation on the closing words of the Hail Mary.

“Pray for us now and at the hour of our birth.”

Unlike Hadrian’s fatalistic “Animula,” Eliot’s is about the soul that “(i)ssues from the hand of God,” and is brought back to him at the end of its earthly life through the Eucharist and Mary’s intercession.

“Marina” is not Christmas-themed but it develops the same themes as the other Ariel Poems. It explores another strange confluence of life and death, this time as the two extremes of a play's recognition scene. The recognition scene in question is that of Shakespeare’s Pericles, Prince of Tyre.

In the poem, Pericles describes how he feels upon discovering that his daughter Marina, whom he believed dead at sea, is alive. The poem is prefaced with a quote from Seneca’s play Hercules Furens (The Madness of Hercules). It draws a contrast between the recognition scenes of Seneca’s play and Shakespeare’s. Hercules is sent into a fit of insanity by a god and awakes to discover that he has killed his children. Pericles believed that the shoddy ship he had built had caused his daughter’s death but now discovers that she is still alive.

The final poem in the series, however, brings us back squarely to Christmas.  In “Animula,” Eliot speaks of the pleasure the child takes in the Christmas tree. Here, he muses further on the phenonemon and deems it paradigmatic.

“There are several attitudes towards Christmas,
Some of which we may disregard:
The social, the torpid, the patently commercial,
The rowdy (the pubs being open till midnight),
And the childish – which is not that of the child
For whom the candle is a star, and the gilded angel
Spreading its wings at the summit of the tree
Is not only a decoration, but an angel.”

Eliot highlights how the child looks at the tree, indeed the world, sacramentally. Through the simple decoration of an angel, the child enters into contact with the invisible reality that it symbolises. The child thereby teaches how we should look on the world and see things more perceptively.

The importance and challenges of seeing and perceiving things properly is another common thread of these poems. The collection closes on another, and a liturgical one at that: Christ’s first coming always foreshadows his second.

"The accumulated memories of annual emotion
May be concentrated into a great joy
Which shall be also a great fear, as on the occasion
When fear came upon every soul:
Because the beginning shall remind us of the end
And the first coming of the second coming"

Eliot’s Ariel Poems feature familiar Christmas motifs, such as the magi and Christmas trees, but also strange, unfamiliar perspectives. Therein lies their value. Devoid of platitudes, they make us meditate upon certain implications of Christ’s Incarnation that might otherwise escape our notice.