After Christmas

Poems and Thoughts from the Anxious Poet

Kelham Island - Sheffield - January 3rd 2025 | Photo Credit Adrian Scott

After Christmas
Holiday keeps the world at bay, 
cossets, comforts each quiet day.
A safe house, Yule log warming, 
the easy Christmas yawning.
Now a new year, waking under dawn, 
hearing the dark morning's scorn.
'Calling, please, what is my calling 
and whose burdens am I hauling?' 
Time to look at the faded year 
to be candid, direct, and clear.
I have been trading myself, 
my precious animating health, 
for a work of worthy deeds 
in the name of other's needs.
If I am to serve the tender fire 
and rouse my dormant desire, 
I need to live from the inside, 
to serenely, firmly brush aside 
the tyrannical phone's demand, 
to be the work of a gentler hand.
Not swirl the whirl of other's schemes, 
but rather live my given dreams.

The time after twelfth night - often a strange and discouraging period, this period evokes moments of introversion for me. Most have removed the cheery and illuminating decorations and returned to the quotidian tasks that they gleefully abandoned over the festive period.

I wrote this poem around fifteen years ago and yet it still speaks to me. In a conversation with one of my daughters this afternoon we were discussing the idea of the soul, ψυχή in greek, anima in latin. To state the obvious it is where we get the word psychology. My studies of Jung have made me think deeply about the word and its meaning. I think the latin anima helps to elucidate what I think it means. It is from this word that we understand what it is to be animated, to be full of life and engagement.

In A Man For All Seasons by Robert Bolt he puts these words in the mouth of Sir Thomas More, sometime Lord Chancellor under Henry the eighth.

When a man takes an oath, he's holding his own self in his own hands like water, and if he opens his fingers then, he needn't hope to find himself again.

This is gives another hint as to what the soul is, that self that she takes in her hands when she makes a vow, that if he lets it slip away for gain, he better not look for it again.

This is what Jung says about the soul:

‘Learn your theories as well as you can, but put them aside when you touch the miracle of the living soul.’

I realise at this time of year when I come back to the work I am doing, after the wonder and challenge of a break, the lovely excess and the facing of the my shadows, it creates a desire for an honest assessment. The question presented itself to me then and now - who am I doing it all for? Have I got caught into serving other’s wishes at the cost of my precious animating health? My soul is the place of the tender fire, and that fire needs to be tended and when it is tended it releases my given dreams.

If you want a good summation of what I mean go no further than Dylan Thomas. On New Year’s Eve we sat with our oldest friends Graham and Helen and watched the recent National Theatre production of Under Milkwood with Michael Sheen. Here is the end of the opening soliloquy.

Only you can hear and see, behind the eyes of the sleepers, the movements and countries and mazes and colours and dismays and rainbows and tunes and wishes and flight and fall and despairs and big seas of their dreams.

This is what is swimming under the soul’s surface and my poem is an invitation to find those swimmers - be they minnows or whales.

Holy Island - Lindisfarne - January 4th 2024 | Photo Credit Adrian Scott