Title page

As we prepare to close the Library for Christmas, we pick from our shelves a Christmas ‘gift’ to share with you: the 1954 Faber and Faber ‘Ariel Poem’, T. S. Eliot’s The cultivation of Christmas trees.  Faber and Faber’s Ariel poems were two series of little booklets, each containing a single poem, bound in brightly coloured paper wrappers with the intention that they might be sent as Christmas greetings (see Ricks and McCue, The poems of T.S. Eliot, volume 1, page 757).  The first series (of 38 titles) was published between 1927 and 1931, with a second series (of 8 poems) inaugurated in 1954 with The cultivation of Christmas trees.

Eliot’s The cultivation of Christmas trees was his sixth contribution to the Ariel series, and, with the first four poems (‘The journey of the Magi’ (1927); ‘A song to Simeon’ (1928); ‘Animula’ (1929); and ‘Marina’ (1930)), has been published as part of his Collected poems under the section title ‘Ariel Poems’ since 1963 (The poems of T.S. Eliot, volume 1, page 780).  (The fifth Ariel poem by Eliot, ‘Triumphal March’, was transferred to the ‘Unfinished Poems’ section.)  Although not obligatory, contributors to the series were encouraged that ‘a subject suitable for the season would be most acceptable’ (Eliot to Walter de la Mare, 20^th March 1952, quoted in The poems of T.S. Eliot, volume 1, page 759), and Eliot certainly obliged with his rumination on the Christmas tree.  The poem seeks to recapture ‘the spirit of wonder’ of the Christmas season, recalling childhood when

… 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.                     (lines 6-8)

We are encouraged to forget the other types of Christmas, ‘The social, the torpid, the patently commercial’ (line 3), and to focus on ‘the childish – which is not that of the child’ (line 5).

Illustration by David Jones

A striking feature of the Ariel pamphlets are the illustrations specially commissioned to accompany the poems.  The cultivation of Christmas trees was illustrated by the poet-painter David Jones (1895-1974), who in 1954 was already an established artist and poet.  In Parenthesis, an epic poem based on his months in the trenches during the First World War, had been published in 1937 with support from Eliot (David Jones, page 14); The Anathemata, a work considered by W. H. Auden as the best long poem in English of the 20^th century, had followed in 1952; and in 1954 Jones was enjoying a retrospective exhibition at the National Museum of Wales (see Blond Fine Art, David Jones 1895-1974).

His delicate illustration for this pamphlet, depicting a wounded deer in front of a tree lit with candles, the wooded landscape partly scarred, is in line with others of his figurative drawings from c. 1937 onwards which ‘celebrate the Incarnation of Christ and His redemption of the world through his sacrifice on Calvary’ (David Jones, page 58).  Jones was also a noted calligrapher and designed an inscription for the foot of the poem, picking up line 26’s reference to St. Lucy, the saint associated with Christmas in Sweden (The poems of T.S. Eliot, volume 1, page 782).  Although printed in black, the original was in several colours, with LVCIA in crimson and the Greek in khaki yellow water-colour (see The painted inscriptions of David Jones, no.34).

Inscription at foot of poem

[Translation: ‘With Lucy and all your saints into whose company admit us, bestower of forgiveness | In peace flourishing and in gentle-handed wholeness’]

The Ariel poems were made with the intention that they could be sent as gifts and it was as a gift that Worcester College Library received this item – from our Old Member (Herbert) John Paris (1912-1985), who matriculated at the College in October 1932, graduating B.Litt. in 1938.  Paris followed a career in museum curatorship, first at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, then at the National Gallery of South Africa, and finally as the Director of the National Army Museum in London.  (It was perhaps with his curatorial experience in mind that he also left a bequest to the College which still allows us to fund conservation work on our pictures.)  In his private life he was himself a poet and a posthumous collection of his work, The mind is a sky, was published in 1986 (and reviewed in the College Record for 1989 by the then Provost of Worcester Asa Briggs).  In 1998, over 200 titles from his library were accessioned into the Library, forming a collection with a particular focus on poetry and art – that is, word and image, a combination nicely encapsulated in Eliot’s The cultivation of Christmas Trees, illustrated by David Jones.

Paris’ gift label

Mark Bainbridge, Librarian

Bibliography

• Blond Fine Art Ltd., David Jones 1895-1974 : Engravings [exhibition held at] Blond Fine Art [between] September 23-October 16 (London: Blond Fine Art, 1982)
• Gray, N., The Painted Inscriptions of David Jones (London: G. Fraser, 1981)
• Hills, P. and N. Gray, David Jones (London: Tate Gallery, 1981)
• Ricks, C. and J. McCue, The poems of T.S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 2015)