One cannot but admire the simple precision of the language, or the finely controlled climax which tries to remind us of Emmanuel (meaning 'God with us'); in this case, still with us under the signs of bread and wine. But the poem also acknowledges the banalities of the secular side of Christmas: the “tissued fripperies”, or the exchange of “sweet and silly” gifts – not forgetting the “hideous tie so kindly meant”. This amounts to a graphic evocation, lightly done, of the consumerist aspects of Christmas. These, along with the more substantial or justifiable rejoicings,
can be validated, the argument runs, only with reference to the foundational “tale” of Christmas: that of the “Maker of the stars and sea” becoming incarnate as “a Child on earth”. There is, however, another – and very different – dimension which points to the kind of religious doubt that we might expect to find in such 20th-century writing. The presence of doubt is clearly signalled in the proliferation of question marks over the first seven lines of the excerpt. No less than three times, the speaker feels obliged to ask if the “tremendous tale” of the Nativity is
actually “true”. What if the “tale” is simply that, a legend handed down from the past? Such doubts are part and parcel of modern scepticism; but in fact they were inherited from a previous era, that of the Victorians of the second half of the 19th century. There were many cultural causes for this decline in belief which we need not pause to enumerate. It is enough, perhaps, to note that the word 'agnosticism' first appeared in the English language in 1869, and was coined by the biologist T.H. Huxley (a Darwinian) to describe his own position.
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