German Christmas card, 1915 |
What does the holy season of Christmas have to do with war? Egbert Sandford’s poem “At Bethlehem—1915” re-imagines the nativity in ways more typically found in a gothic horror film or a war propagandist’s appeal. We are invited to see the nativity with fresh eyes: it is no less than a cataclysmic invasion.
The travellers
are astir—
Bearing
frowns for incense,
Scorns for myrrh.
War flings its sign afar—
There’s
blood upon the Manger,
Blood upon the Star.
Dear Lord:
Who
fain would find the Saviour
Find the Sword.
--E.T.
Sandford
Just where is
the Prince of Peace in this manger scene? The three kings have been elbowed
aside by angry, scornful troops moving towards battle, and the glow of
glory from above has been smeared with blood. Is the poem’s last verse a prayer
to the Lord or a challenge to his people? What might it mean to search for the
Christ-child with a sword or to find deadly weapons in Bethlehem’s stable?
Sandford, a government-employed
warehouse manager at Plymouth, described himself as “just an ordinary working
man.” His chief literary influences were the poets William Blake and Francis
Thompson, and he credited “a literary class at Blackheath” for having given him
the encouragement and inspiration to write. Sandford asserted that the primary
aim of his poetry was to “take the common things of life and weave them into
song.”* His poem “Bethlehem—1915” may be one of the
most unusual Christmas carols ever composed.
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*From the introduction to his book Brookdown & Other Poems, 1916.
*From the introduction to his book Brookdown & Other Poems, 1916.
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