A little spare the night I loved, \ And hold it solemn to the past. - Christmas and context

I have committed a venial literary sin and am duly chastened.

I read Robert Browning's long poem Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day (1850) in part just because I wanted to filch Christmasy bits for the blog.  I found nothing, absolutely nothing, and instead read a long, dull poem in the Victorian Faith and Doubt genre.

A traveller, escaping from a Christmas Eve storm, enters a little chapel.  He may or may not be a religious skeptic, but he is contemptuous of the small-town church and sermon.  He falls asleep, or has a mystical experience, in which he is transported by Christ to Rome, and then to Germany, and learns to not be so rude in other people's churchs.  Or something like that.  Here's a good description, of a woman entering the chapel:

Well, from the road, the lanes or the common,
In came the flock: the fat weary woman,
Panting and bewildered, down-clapping
  Her umbrella with a mighty report,
Grounded it by me, wry and flapping,
  A wreck of whalebones (47-52)

Pretty good, but not really very Christmasy, is it?  And most of the poem is not descriptive but argumentative.

I was surprised to find so much about Christmas in Tennyson's In Memoram (also 1850).  Three Christmas scenes provide one of the few concrete structural devices in a mostly abstractly structured poem.  From the third Christmas:

The time draws near the birth of Christ;
  The moon is hid, the night is still;
  A single church below the hill
Is pealing, folded in the mist (Stanza 104).

Which is nice enough, I guess, but treating a chunk of this poem about grief and loss as Christmas decoration seems misguided.  This particular Christmas is the third since the loss of Tennyson's best friend, so the theme is acceptance:

Let cares that petty shadows cast,
  By which our lives are chiefly proved,
  A little spare the night I loved,
And hold it solemn to the past. (105)

Not exactly cheery, but suitably serious.  Even useful to this reader, but useless out of context.

As a result, readers of Wuthering Expectations will have to make due, tomorrow, with a sculpture of Santa with a possum in his pocket.

What colour are ash-buds in March?

"Now, what colour are ash-buds in March?"

Is the man going mad? thought I. He is very like Don Quixote.

"What colour are they, I say?" repeated he vehemently.

"I am sure I don't know, sir," said I, with the meekness of ignorance.

"I knew you didn't. No more did I--an old fool that I am!--till this young man comes and tells me. Black as ash-buds in March. And I've lived all my life in the country; more shame for me not to know. Black: they are jet-black, madam." And he went off again, swinging along to the music of some rhyme he had got hold of.

We're in Chapter IV of Cranford, "A Visit to an Old Bachelor." The "young man" who comes along is actually Alfred Tennyson; the line about the ash-buds is from a long, dullish poem called "The Gardener's Daughter; or, The Pictures."

Gaskell is delineating her method here. The art of the novel, or this novel, is in the accumulation of tiny details. But Gaskell is not Tennyson. All of her descriptive writing is about people, and not about how they look, but about their behavior, and their things - their food and furniture, and clothes, always their clothes. Nature is for the poets.

The poetry enthusiast wants to read a poem to the ladies, "and Miss Pole encouraged him in his proposal, I thought, because she wished me to hear his beautiful reading, of which she had boasted; but she afterwards said it was because she had got to a difficult part of her crochet, and wanted to count her stitches without having to talk." Pretty sharply observed.

Entire passages are devoted to hats, and the vulgarity of the name of the local doctor (Mr. Hoggins, "but, as Miss Jenkyns said, if he changed it to Piggins it would not be much better"), and the difficulty of using a particularly small set of sugar-tongs, evidence of miserliness: "Very delicate was the china, and very old the plate, very thin the bread and butter, and very small the lumps of sugar" (Ch. VIII).

Isn't "very" one of those empty words that a good writer is supposed to suppress? I guess a great writer is allowed to use it.

I didn't know the colour of the ash-buds myself. I'm not as good a poetry reader as that farmer, and probably would not have noticed that detail in Tennyson. But I'll remember it now, along with a hundred other marvels from Cranford.