Whatever your views of Christianity, I think you have to give it credit for being the first religion, so far as I know, to put a baby centre stage, at least for part of the story, and thus to harness properly that instinct for the love and care of its young which is one of humanity’s more redeeming features. The Norse gods, for example, are far too busy fighting giants and getting ready for the end of the world to have any time for babyolatry, while appearances of babies in Greek myth tend to be rather disturbing: they are either being devoured by their father in case they grow up to overthrow him, getting cast into fires (admittedly with the best of intentions), being submerged in rivers (ditto), or, in the case of Heracles, being assailed by giant snakes slithering towards their cradle (relax: he’d been working out and simply strangled them).

The Nativity in contrast is one of the keystones of Christianity, and among the endless literary and artistic takes on it I like this quirky one by John Short (1911-1991). I’m afraid I know nothing about John Short beyond the fact that he wrote this poem and that it has been set to music – he seems to have largely slipped between the cracks as far as the Internet goes.

Note: Salford is a town in Greater Manchester, England, at one time last century a byword for slums and poverty. It is the ‘dirty old town’ of Ewan MacColl’s famous song.

Carol

There was a Boy bedded in bracken,
Like to a sleeping snake all curled he lay;
On his thin navel turned this spinning sphere,
Each feeble finger fetched seven suns away.
He was not dropped in good-for-lambing weather,
He took no suck when shook buds sung together,
But he is come in cold-as-workhouse weather,
Poor as a Salford child.

John Short