Evening Without Angels

This past weekend we brought a cut tree into our living room, put multicolored lights on it, and hung ornaments from it, a process always regarded with intense wonder by our cats, who thinks it's odd and exciting. On the top of the tree, we put a star.

When I was growing up, we were only allowed to put birds and pears on our tree, with an angel at the top. In reaction to that, I've always hung anything and everything on my own trees, including bits of baked and painted clay or bells twisted up with pipe cleaners that my kids brought home from preschool. I hang ornaments people have given me as gifts, including a number of very pretty angels.

Looking at the lighted tree this morning, when we all had to get up before dawn, made me think of the poem, "Evening Without Angels," by Wallace Stevens. Like most Stevens poems, it's not one that I feel like I completely "get," but I like the way the words make me feel. It's not a poem I think you need to try to understand; it's enough to try to absorb the images as they go by:

Why seraphim like lutanists arranged
Above the trees? And why the poet as
Eternal chef d'orchestre?

Air is air.
Its vacancy glitters around us everywhere.
Its sounds are not angelic syllables
But our unfashioned spirits realized
More sharply in more furious selves.

And light
That fosters seraphim and is to them
Coiffeur of haloes, fecund jeweler--
Was the sun concoct for angels or for men?
Sad men made angels of the sun, and of
The moon they made their own attendant ghosts,
Which led them back to angels, after death.

Let this be clear that we are men of sun
And men of day and never of pointed night,
Men that repeat antiquest sounds of air
In an accord of repetitions. Yet,
If we repeat, it is because the wind
Encircling us, speaks always with our speech.

Light, too, encrusts us making visible
The motions of the mind and giving form
To moodiest nothings, as, desire for day
Accomplished in the immensely flashing East,
Desire for rest, in that descending sea
Of dark, which in its very darkening
Is rest and silence spreading into sleep.

...Evening, when the measure skips a beat
And then another, one by one, and all
To a seething minor swiftly modulate.
Bare night is best. Bare earth is best. Bare, bare,
Except for our own houses, huddled low
Beneath the arches and their spangled air,
Beneath the rhapsodies of fire and fire,
Where the voice that is in us makes a true response,
Where the voice that is great within us rises up,
As we stand gazing at the rounded moon.

This is a time of year when a lot of us feel like our most "furious selves," isn't it? And we're approaching the longest night of the year. Despite the pronoun, I feel the lines "we are men of sun/And men of day and never of pointed night" because even during this magical time of year, with Christmas lights and trees and angels all around, dawn comes to me as a relief and dusk as something to ward off with lamps and candles, "huddled" in the house.

What is (or will be) on top of your Christmas tree?