Blake’s Nativity
Stephen Pritchard reflects on Blake’s treatment of the Christmas story and offers a poetic response of his own.
The deep of winter came;
What time the secret child,
Descended thro’ the orient gates of the eternal day:
War ceas’d, & all the troops like shadows fled to their abodes.
I’ve always loved these lines from Blake’s Europe a Prophecy (1794) that describe the birth of Jesus/Orc in a beautiful parody of Milton’s On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44735/on-the-morning-of-christs-nativity
In the 1970s I started writing a poem in response to Blake’s response to Milton. I would like to invite you to write your own response to their words. This is my offering, which I have just completed 42 years later.
Pain Threshold
I knew by his manna
He was God:
He gave himself away.
And every present that
Rose on high
Fell out of yesterday.
A tiny bundle, rapt
In white was
Bound to wake the dead:
A child as good, as gold,
As God: as fresh, as hot,
As bread
Stephen Pritchard
Images from Blake’s Illustrations to Milton’s On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity, The Thomas Set, 1809.