Amongst the Ruins: Why Civilizations

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John Darlington
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AMONGST
THE RUINS
Why Civilizations Collapse
and Communities Disappear

John Darlington

YA L E U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S
N e w H av e n a n d L o n d o n
p. 13: Quotes from both The Tollund Man and Bogland by Seamus Heaney,
from New Selected Poems 1966–1987 © The Estate of Seamus Heaney. Used
by permission of Faber and Faber Limited. Used by permission of Farrar,
Straus & Giroux, LLC, http://us.macmillan.com/fsg. All rights reserved
p. 13: © George Barnett, 1965, The Beaghmore Stone Circles from his collection
of poems The Wee Black Tin, by kind permission of Graham Mawhinney
p. 36: By kind permission © Nicholas Comfort 1994 The Lost
City of Dunwich published by Terence Dalton, Ltd
p. 156: Permission granted by Zehao Zhou to quote from his
dissertation The Anti-Confucian Campaign during the Cultural
Revolution, August 1966–January 1967 © Zehao Zhou
p. 180: © Bobby Troup/Warner Chappell Sync
p. 184: From The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck published by Penguin
Classics. Copyright © John Steinbeck 1939. Reprinted by permission of
Penguin Books Limited. Copyright renewed © John Steinbeck 1967
p. 257: By kind permission © Graham Fairclough 2009
Copyright © 2023 John Darlington
All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or
in part, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107
and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the
public press) without written permission from the publishers.
For information about this and other Yale University
Press publications, please contact:
U.S. Office: sales.press@yale.edu yalebooks.com
Europe Office: sales@yaleup.co.uk yalebooks.co.uk
Typesetting and eBook by Tetragon, London
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022948965
ISBN 978-0-300-25928-5
eISBN 978-0-300-27133-1
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Contents

Preface vii

Introduction: The Anatomy of Loss 1

1. Climate Change 9

The Stone Circles of the Sperrin Mountains, Northern Ireland 11

Herschel Island – Qikiqtaruk, Canada 22
Dunwich, England 32
The Garamantes, Libya 41

2. Natural Hazards 53

Port Royal, Jamaica 55

Ani, Turkey 66
Plymouth, Montserrat 75

3. Human Disaster 87

Girsu, Iraq 89
St Kilda, Scotland 100
Rapa Nui (Easter Island), Chile 110

4. War 125

Nimrud, Iraq 127

The Old Summer Palace, China 137
The Temple of Confucius, China 151
5. Economy 165

Humberstone Mine, Chile 168

Route 66, US 180
Beaudesert Hall, England 191
Abu Simbel and the Nubian Monuments, Egypt and Sudan 201

Conclusion 215

Understanding Loss and Renewal on a Global Stage 215

Learning the Lessons of the Past 234

Acknowledgements 261
Notes 262
Bibliography 269
Image Credits 280
Index 283
Preface

The best of Prophets of the future is the Past.

Lord Byron; diary extract, 28 January 1821

Or alternatively:

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to

repeat it.
George Santayana

Study the past, if you would divine the future.

Confucius

The past resembles the future more than one drop of water
resembles another.
Ibn Khaldun

At times it feels like the past is filled with a cacophony of voices

warning about how important it is to learn from the past. Indeed,
there are at least 300 familiar quotations which champion the rel-
evance of history to the future.
However, there is a counterview that it is impossible, fruitless even,
to try to treat what has happened previously as a useful barometer
for what will happen next:
If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach
us! But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which
experience gives us is a lantern on the stern which shines
only on the waves behind.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history
is the most important of all the lessons of history.
Aldous Huxley

vii
And, of course, there is always the ever-quotable Mark Twain,
who remarked, ‘The past does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.’ My
favourite, however, and a reason for writing this book, is from an
anonymous source: ‘History repeats itself because no one was lis-
tening the first time.’ Clearly, I am firmly in the camp that claims
there are valuable lessons to learn, it’s all about asking the right
question. How can we train ourselves to pay better attention to
those voices of yesteryear, particularly during times of collapse and
crisis, or ahead of them?
This book explores some of the ways that we can draw from
the past, both philosophically and practically, to help plan for and
guide the future.

AMONGST THE RUINS

viii
AMONGST
THE RUINS
81
Introduction

The Anatomy of Loss

Ruins lie at the heart of this book. Mutely eloquent reminders of our
immortality, they are memento mori on the grandest scale. They are
the architectural car crashes of the past which we rubberneck from
the present, whispering ‘there but for the grace of God go I . . .’.
Ruins represent our failures: civilizations that have collapsed, commu-
nities who moved out or were forced to move on, or the abandoned
dreams of despots, democrats and the divine. But, given that time is
relative, and all buildings will eventually end as dust, they are also
our successes, notices marking the extraordinary achievements of
humankind. Ruins prompt questions: what person visiting the red
sandstone facades of Petra’s Treasury would not ask why or how?
Machu Picchu, Chichen Itza and Angkor Wat inspire because we
want to know more about the people who built them. And, while
they signify lives lived long ago, they also tell us something about
where we are heading. Ruins are libraries, abandoned books that
divulge stories about what happened decades, centuries or millennia
ago, and which are repeated today. The outcome may not be the
same, but we would be arrogant to ignore the lessons of history.
This book is a search for the present and future in the past. In
it we will explore the loss of ancient civilizations, the collapse of
ruling elites and the disappearance of more recent communities.
This is a vast subject. Edward Gibbon needed six volumes for his
History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1766–89),

1
which has now been reprinted countless times. A search of the
internet using the phrase ‘fall of empire’ will bring up thousands of
books, videos and films documenting the stumble, trip and sprawl
of the powerful, from the Aztecs and Incas through to the empires
of the British, Soviets and Americans. Flick through the pages of any
atlas of world history and be overwhelmed by the growing bloom
and subsequent shrivelling of colours depicting the tread of ancient
Mesopotamians, Mongols, Umayyads, Spaniards and Portuguese,
amongst many, many others. The last imperial Chinese dynasty
stretched over nearly 15 million square kilometres at its greatest
extent (the Qing Dynasty in 1790 ce), and doubtless more still
will be written about modern China, the twenty-first-century global
superpower, when its time has passed.
These are fascinating approaches, but I am interested in the
explanations that underpin why ancient and more recent civilizations
disappeared. How did we reach the ruin? What are the reasons behind
the fall, or the shrinking frontiers in the atlas? And, as importantly,
is there a commonality to that loss that might help us today?
In response to that challenge, I have selected seventeen places
from across the globe that illustrate specific stories of decline and

Fig. 1 ‘Destruction’ by Thomas Cole from The Course of Empire series, 1836. This,
the fourth in a series of five paintings on the subject of the rise and fall of civilizations,
shows barbarians sacking a classical city. It is followed by ‘Desolation’.

2AMONGST THE RUINS

2
collapse. Some will be recognizable and well known, but most have
been chosen to touch on the fascinating variety of heritage across the
world and the connections between people and disappearance. The
book is divided into five organizing themes which seek to corral the
causes of loss: climate change, natural hazards, economics, human
frailty and war. Selected because they are the most cited reasons
for collapse, the categories overlap, with human decision-making
influencing them all. Critically, there is rarely a single explanation
for why civilizations fail. The cumulative impact of multiple causes
is acknowledged from the outset, where one disaster compounds
another, often leading to a catastrophic downward spiral. Some
stories will speak solely to the organizing theme, but where there
are multiple causes, the theme may be the most significant, or the
trigger for decline, or will introduce an important and interesting
line of discussion.
My scope is broad. Our raw materials are the physical remains of
architectural and archaeological heritage, but I touch on intangible
cultural traditions, particularly in the last chapter where I explore
the inevitability of future loss in which it may be impossible to retain
even the ruins of the past. Here, taking the past with you in the form
of the activity, be it an idea, a function, a dance, recipe or song, as
opposed to bricks and mortar, becomes an important option.
My chronology and geography are wide-ranging too, with some
stories sealed under 3,000-year-old peat and others that are told
through the carcasses of twentieth-century buildings. I take in most
of the world’s continents, from the ice of the Arctic fringe, through
to the desert landscapes of North Africa, by way of South America’s
high mountains and Southeast Asia’s urban sprawl. Not all the tales
are told at the same speed. Some are about instant catastrophe,
the minutes it might take an earthquake to destroy a place; others
are about a gentle implosion, the architectural equivalent of taking
an undercooked soufflé out of the oven; yet more still are about a
decline which is so slow that those living through it are not even
aware of it. But importantly, all the stories contain lessons that are
applicable well beyond the sight of their tumbled walls or abandoned
landscapes.
Nor are all the stories told at the same scale. Sometimes the
headline is about a civilization – the Sumerians, for example, who

The Anatomy of Loss3

3
once dominated what is now southern Iraq. Here, through the lens
of the abandonment of the city of Girsu, we will explore the impact
of salinification on a sophisticated agricultural system that once
supported a large population. Alternatively, the story might focus
on a stratum of society as told through the loss of a single build-
ing – Beaudesert Hall: the fall from power of the landed ‘gentry’ in
England due to taxation, economics and changing social attitudes. Or
it might be about the loss of a community because the raison d’être
of that community has disappeared, as in the case of Humberstone
in Chile, which was abandoned when the saltpetre mined there was
rendered obsolete by new materials manufactured elsewhere.
A depressing subject? If this book were a film, it might be intro-
duced by credits warning ‘May contain scenes of doom, death,
decline, disaster . . .’ – a decidedly downbeat alliteration. At first
glance the topic is all about failure: our overexploitation of the
earth’s natural resources, our response to the inevitable impact of
building homes on the slopes of a volcano and in the places where
tectonic plates collide, or our tribal urge to destroy the neighbours.
The body count adds up. There is definitely an element of schaden-
freude in the telling of these stories, but we should not enjoy them
as tales of horror, something which happened a long time ago that is
somehow detached and irrelevant today. This feels like sitting in an
idling car and complaining about the traffic jam – we are the traffic.
The fact is that many of the stories concern trends and patterns that
are present, if not amplified, in our current world.
But I also don’t want to paint a picture that is all doom and
gloom. Human ingenuity in the face of adversity is inspirational
and is told in part here, as are the multiple adaptations to changes
that made life more difficult for ancient peoples across the world.
Run out of water? Use technology to search for it deeper in the
earth or dam valleys to capture it in the winter for use in the hotter
summer months. Too much water? Build above it, divert it or use
windmills to pump it elsewhere. The geography of the 17 per cent
of the Netherlands that has been reclaimed from the sea is founded
on just such ingenuity. There are limits to where humankind can
and cannot live, but these have always changed. What worship-
per of Luna, Khonsu, Artemis, Máni, Chandra, Tsukuyomi-no-
Mikoto or Metztli – gods and goddesses of the moon from across

4AMONGST THE RUINS

4
the world – would conceive we could land on its stony surface and
succeed in returning to the mortal world?
There is also that question of timescale. For example, to view the
decline of the Roman Empire as a long and relentless progression of
disasters ignores both its peaks and the positives. And that is if we
can agree what triggered it, and when, and what marked its final
dying breath. Gibbon’s classic, Fall of the Roman Empire, covered
a period of 1,500 years, and he firmly fired the starting gun for the
crisis in 376 ce when large numbers of Gothic peoples began cross-
ing the Rhine. Most mark 476 ce to be the death knell, when the
barbarian king Odoacer overthrew the teenage Romulus Augustus,
the last emperor of the Western Empire, and the Senate sent the impe-
rial insignia to Flavius Zeno, his counterpart in the Eastern Empire.
But of course, the collapse of the Western Roman Empire was then
succeeded by the flourishing of the East: ‘Rome did not fall in the
fifth or sixth centuries. It changed and multiplied itself . . . It may
have been a chameleon, but it was certainly no phoenix, because
there were no ashes.’1 Others see the origins of decay much earlier,
in the loss of power of the Republican democratic institutions, the
moment Augustus declared himself princeps civitas, first amongst
the people, in 27 bce.2 Still more point to the Muslim conquests
of the eighth century as the beginning of the end.3
Perspective is important too: using the same example, who suffered
from Rome’s decline? Certainly not the Gothic peoples who had been
pushed out of their lands by the Huns, nor perhaps many of the
people working on the trading routes of the Mediterranean, where
the short-term interruption of political events could be overridden
by the need for bread, wine and oil. Many now see this period of
Late Antiquity as a time of change between the classical and medi-
eval worlds, with plenty of continuity in everyday life, interspersed
by events that impacted dramatically on the political and religious
leadership.
The point is that the concept of decline is a moving target, some-
times clear-cut – the break-up of the Soviet Union, the fall of Nazi
Germany or the collapse of the British Empire – but often the path
to ruination is uneven, messy and complex.
A final point on the tone of this exploration into the loss of
civilizations is that it is written from an archaeological perspective.

The Anatomy of Loss5

5
What does that mean? It means that archaeologists have a long
body clock. We work not to years nor decades, but to centuries and
millennia. Ours is a slow heartbeat, where the important issues of
each era are filtered out from the day-to-day by the inevitable reck-
oning of time. Consequently, we see change as the only constant in
history. And in the context of such a long view of the past, every
civilization will eventually turn to dust. To continue our Roman
analogy, we are blessed with some remarkable monuments dating
to the period: from the Colosseum in the imperial capital, through
to Baalbek’s temples, Ephesus’s Great Theatre and Hadrian’s Wall.
But these monuments are the stubborn survivors of literally millions
of buildings that once existed, the tiniest fraction of an architectural
heritage that has entirely disappeared. The others, which ranged from
simple wooden homes to stone-built palaces, have either decayed or
have been demolished, reused or built over. Nothing lasts forever.
One day, ideally in the unimaginable distance of the future, the
Pantheon will eventually succumb to the ageing process of time. If
a similar prognosis is offered for all our physical cultural legacy,
then immortality is born of the passing on of ideas. We celebrate
the architecture of the past in our own moments, seek to conserve
that which we value now and, at the same time, try to predict what
future generations will cherish.

6AMONGST THE RUINS

6
 82

8AMONGST THE RUINS

8
Chapter 1

Climate Change

G iven the urgency of the current climate crisis, we tend to

frame change in the present or the recent past, and on our own
actions that have accelerated or will slow it. But, regardless of the
undeniable impact of human influence, the planet’s climate has been
changing since before humans walked the earth. Four stories of the
disappearance of historic cultures are presented here, which each
explore how communities have responded to climatic conditions
that have been getting incrementally cooler, wetter, warmer or drier.
First, we step back to the Bronze Age and see the impact of climate
change on the pastoral Bronze Age peoples who inhabited the slopes
of the Sperrin Mountains in Northern Ireland. Here at places like
Beaghmore and Copney a remarkable assemblage of stone circles,
alignments, avenues and cairns are to be found hidden underneath
the moorland peat, symbols of a wider hidden landscape lost to the
onset of the wetter, colder climatic conditions of the Late Bronze
Age (1200–650 bce). How did this happen, what was our human
contribution, and how did we respond?
Next, we will turn to Herschel Island (Qikiqtaruk) off the Yukon
coast of Canada, where a warming climate rather than a cooling one
is the issue. Used as an Inuvialuit hunting base for centuries, and more
recently established as a commercial whaling station, Herschel was
all but abandoned after the market for whale oil collapsed in 1907.
Now increased global temperatures are presenting new challenges to

9
preservation, with rising sea levels sweeping away both European
and earlier culture, and thawing permafrost accelerating the discov-
ery and destruction of once frozen archaeology. Permafrost covers
almost a quarter of the Northern Hemisphere, including Alaska,
much of Canada, and Siberia. It contains within it the remarkably
preserved remains of earlier peoples: evidence that is desiccated and
lost as the permafrost disappears. This will be one of the biggest and
least appreciated losses of global cultural heritage in future times.
Coastal climate change is graphically illustrated in our third story,
using the example of Dunwich off England’s Suffolk coast. Listed in
the Domesday Book of 1086 as one of the ten largest towns in the
country, Dunwich once had a population of over 5,000 people and
eighteen churches and religious institutions. Now, just two churches
remain, and fewer than 200 residents, the remainder of the town
being lost to the sea. Again, the question is asked, how did the people
of Dunwich respond to the slow death of their town?
From too much water, to drought, the final story under the
theme of climate change describes the equally destructive impact
of a warming, drier environment on heritage. The Garamantes’
empire once stretched for 647,500 square kilometres in the Saharan
area of Libya and North Africa. Originating from Berber tribes in
the Iron Age (200 bce) and rising to regional prominence in the
second century ce, the Garamantes were described by Herodotus
as ‘a very great nation’. Despite Roman propaganda which sought
to depict the Garamantes as barbarians, they inhabited a powerful
and sophisticated kingdom with a capital that was home to 10,000
people. The Garamantes’ success was built on their sophisticated
water management system, but in the fourth century ce a drying
climate, coupled with the overexploitation of a diminishing supply
of water and the increasing numbers of slaves required to maintain
it, led to their slow decline and eventual disappearance. Depleting
water supplies, or their salinification, and the loss of civilization
to sand, is a little-told story that can be repeated across the desert
regions of the world.
Climate change will be the biggest global driver of loss of her-
itage over the coming decades, whether through inundation by
water, sand and salt, or because places that were once inhabitable
are no longer so, leading to their abandonment. These four stories

10AMONGST THE RUINS

10
underpin the importance of learning from the past in the face of a
changing climate, or as expressed in this adapted version of a Native
American proverb: ‘We not only inherit the land from our ancestors,
we borrow it from our children.’

The Stone Circles of the Sperrin Mountains, Northern Ireland

Lost worlds have always captured the imagination, whether the

mythological romance of Atlantis and Eldorado or the extraordi-
nary revelations of new technologies, which allow us to see the true
extent of the Angkor Archaeological Park in Cambodia under its
thick canopy of trees and Dunwich in the murky water on the edge
of the North Sea (see below). However, there is another lost land-
scape that we often miss because it is covered not by water, plants
or volcanic debris, but by peat. Globally this inland ‘sea’ covers 4.2
million square kilometres,1 the equivalent of seventeen times the land
area of the United Kingdom. Peat is slow to grow, accumulating at
approximately one millimetre each year, and has featured in our

Fig. 2 Beaghmore circles from the air showing a variety of stone circles, cairns and
alignments. The contrast between the remaining russet-covered peat and green grass
of the excavated area is stark.

Climate Change11
11
landscapes since the end of the last glaciation some 15,000 years
ago; from a modern perspective it therefore has the appearance of
permanence, a soft version of geology. But it is inextricably linked
to humans who lived before its formation, and whose world lies
buried under its dense brown blanket.
Fortunately, a bog is a goldmine for archaeologists because it
locks in so much information not only about its own origin and
growth, but also about what went on in the wider landscape. Any
water-saturated deposits have the potential to preserve evidence from
the past that desiccates, disintegrates and disappears elsewhere. The
cold, wet and oxygen-lite nature of peat slows down the rate of
decay of organic matter, so preserving many things that fall within
its damp, fibrous grasp. It is estimated that archaeologists working
in peatlands may find up to 90 per cent of the material culture of
ancient communities contained within it, as opposed to 10 per cent
of those working on dry land.2 A peat bog can therefore be a library
of the past holding airborne pollen that precisely documents changes
to the surrounding vegetation; seeds and plant material telling us
about diet and materials; the wooden posts and platforms of ancient
homes; even the bodies of people themselves, often beautifully pre-
served but disconcerting victims of prehistoric ritual. The carbon in
the peat gives us dates, while the identifiable marks of bog growth
and contraction tell us something about the climate over millennia.
But peat is selective, in overly acidic conditions the soil can quickly
eat away bone and antler and destroy certain metals, particularly if
they are subjected to repeated wetting and drying.
Bogs don’t just appear, they are living things, requiring the right
combination of wet, cold and poor drainage, and the right type of
wet – in this case acid rich and nutrient poor, mainly falling as rainfall.
There are several different types of peat bog in the UK and Ireland
and their growth is complex, but they may be simplified according
to how they form. Raised bogs, as seen in the west of Ireland, tend
to form from the slow infill of lakes where marginal plants slowly
decompose to slowly choke and absorb the water body. Sphagnum
moss gradually takes over, growing and dying back annually, with
new sphagnum mounting the rotting but partially preserved former
growth. Raised bogs or fen peat can be as much as ten metres deep,
many forming at the end of the last Ice Age around 8000 bce. Blanket

12AMONGST THE RUINS

12
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Fifty
Christmas poems for children
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United
States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away
or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License
included with this ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you
are not located in the United States, you will have to check the
laws of the country where you are located before using this
eBook.

Title: Fifty Christmas poems for children

An anthology selected by Florence B. Hyett

Compiler: Florence B. Hyett

Release date: January 5, 2024 [eBook #72625]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1923

Credits: Bob Taylor, Charlene Taylor and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file
was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FIFTY

CHRISTMAS POEMS FOR CHILDREN ***
FIFTY CHRISTMAS POEMS
FOR CHILDREN
 FIFTY CHRISTMAS
POEMS FOR
CHILDREN

AN ANTHOLOGY SELECTED BY
FLORENCE B. HYETT

Why do the bells of Christmas ring?

Why do little children sing?
Eugene Field

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

NEW YORK MCMXXIII
 COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The Compiler expresses her thanks to Authors and Publishers for

the use of poems in this volume and acknowledges her
indebtedness.
The woodcut on the Cover of this book is reproduced by kind
permission of the artist, Mr. C. T. Nightingale.
INDEX OF AUTHORS AND BIBLIOGRAPHY
PAGE
Anonymous
Old Carol 11
Shepherd’s Song 19
The Cherry-Tree Carol 20
The Holly and the Ivy 41
I Saw Three Ships 60
When Christ Was Born 47
Yule-Tide Fires 51
Bain, C.
In the Night 30
Belloc, Hilaire
The Birds 23
Noël 62
Blake, William
A Cradle Song 22
The Lamb 15
Canton, William
Carol 18
Chesterton, G. K.
A Christmas Carol 37
Cole, Charlotte Druitt
Christmas Eve 24
Crashaw, Richard
Verses from The Shepherd’s Hymn 65
De La Mare, Walter
Before Dawn 43
Field, Eugene From The Complete Poems of
Eugene Field (Copyright, 1910, by Julia S.
Field. Published by Charles Scribner’s
Sons)
Song 16
Star of the East 49
Farjeon, Eleanor
Six Green Singers 52
Gales, R. L.
Three Christmas Songs 26
I. The Guests
II. Cockadoodledoo
III. A Childermas Rhyme
Waiting for the Kings 34
In Præsepio 46
Hardy, Thomas
The Oxen 59
Herrick, Robert
A Christmas Carol 58
An Ode of the Birth of Our Saviour 57
To His Saviour, A Child; A Present from a
56
Child
King, Edith
The Holly 17
Luther, Martin
Cradle Hymn 28
Macdonald, George
A Christmas Prayer 25
Christmas Day and Every Day 13
The Christmas Child 14
That Holy King 54
Meynell, Alice
Unto Us a Son Is Given 64
Middleton, Richard
The Carol of the Poor Children 48
Milton, John
From the “Hymn on the Morning of Christ’s 66
Nativity”
Nightingale, M.
Mary Had a Little Lamb 32
The Waits 44
Rossetti, Christina
A Christmas Carol 50
Southwell, Robert
Behold a Silly Tender Babe 36
Tabb, John Banister
The Lamb-Child 12
Tennyson, Alfred From In Memoriam
The Bells 68
Thompson, Francis
Ex Ore Infantium 38
Tynan, Katharine
A Song of Christmas 40
Bethlehem 33
Watts, Isaac
A Cradle Hymn 42
Young, E. Hilton
Christmas 55
OLD CAROL

E came all so still

Where His mother was,
As dew in April
That falleth on the grass.

He came all so still

To His mother’s bower,
As dew in April
That falleth on the flower.

He came all so still

Where His mother lay,
As dew in April
That falleth on the spray.

Mother and maiden

Was never none but she;
Well may such a lady
God’s mother be.

Anonymous
THE LAMB CHILD

HEN Christ the Babe was born,

Full many a little lamb
Upon the wintry hills forlorn
Was nestled near its dam:

And, waking or asleep,

Upon His Mother’s breast,
For love of her, each mother-sheep
And baby-lamb He blessed.

John Banister Tabb

CHRISTMAS DAY AND EVERY DAY

TAR high
Baby low:
’Twixt the two
Wise men go;
Find the baby,
Grasp the star—
Heirs of all things
Near and far!

George Macdonald
THE CHRISTMAS CHILD

ITTLE one, who straight hast come

Down the heavenly stair,
Tell us all about your home,
And the father there.”

“He is such a one as I

Like as like can be.
Do his will, and, by and by,
Home and him you’ll see.”

George Macdonald
THE LAMB

ITTLE lamb, who made thee?

Dost thou know who made thee,
Gave thee life, and bade thee feed
By the stream and o’er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing, woolly, bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice?
Little lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?

Little lamb, I’ll tell thee;

Little lamb, I’ll tell thee;
He is callèd by thy name,
For He calls Himself a lamb;
He is meek and He is mild,
He became a little child.
I a child and thou a lamb,
We are callèd by His name.
Little lamb, God bless thee!
Little lamb, God bless thee!

William Blake
SONG

HY do the bells of Christmas ring?

Why do little children sing?

Once a lovely shining star,

Seen by shepherds from afar,
Gently moved until its light
Made a manger’s cradle bright.

There a darling baby lay,

Pillowed soft upon the hay;
And its mother sung and smiled:
“This is Christ, the holy Child!”

Therefore bells for Christmas ring,

Therefore little children sing.

Eugene Field
THE HOLLY

OW happy the holly-tree looks, and how strong,

Where he stands like a sentinel all the year long.

Neither dry summer heat nor cold winter hail

Can make that gay warrior tremble or quail.

He has beamed all the year, but bright scarlet he’ll glow
When the ground glitters white with the fresh fallen snow.

Edith King
CAROL

HEN the herds were watching

In the midnight chill,
Came a spotless lambkin
From the heavenly hill.

Snow was on the mountains,

And the wind was cold,
When from God’s own garden
Dropped a rose of gold.

When ’twas bitter winter,

Houseless and forlorn
In a star-lit stable
Christ the Babe was born.

Welcome, heavenly lambkin,

Welcome, golden rose;
Alleluia, Baby
In the swaddling clothes!

William Canton
SHEPHERD’S SONG

S I rode out this enderes’ night,

Of three jolly shepherds I saw a sight
And all about their fold a star shone bright;
They sang, Terli, terlow;
So merrily the shepherds their pipes can blow.

Down from heaven, from heaven so high,

Of angels there came a great company.
With mirth, and joy, and great solemnity
They sang, Terli, terlow;
So merrily the shepherds their pipes can blow.

Old Song