The Some Flowers Soon Christmas Quiz
Sixteen seasonal poetic puzzles
For the next fortnight, Some Flowers Soon is becoming a start-of-the-week publication. This week it’s the Christmas Poetry Quiz — next week, it’s the answers, with all the trimmings. Then I’ll be away and back in the New Year.
Please feel free to share this post with anyone who likes a quiz! The usual rules apply: strictly no Googling, but you may consult poems learned by heart.
Christmas Decorations
“Since Christmas they have lived with us”, wrote Sylvia Plath. What are “they”?
Which American poet, aged 8, composed this rhyming note to Santa on behalf of herself and her brother, Warner?
Dear St. Nicklus:
This Christmas morn
You do adorn
Bring Warner a horn
And me a doll.
That is all.
Christmas Shivers
Which poet wrote a horror-sonnet called “Santa Claus” which ends:
The chimney shook. The children in surprise
Stared up as their invited visitor
Lifted his claws above them, holes for eyes.
What wintry sight did John Davidson describe in this quatrain?
Such its life, and such its pleasure is,
Such its art and traffic, such its gain,
Evermore in new conjunctions this
Admirable angle to maintain.
Christmas Music
Which poet wrote two poems — published thirty-five years apart — about “Parang”, the traditional Christmastime folk music of Trinidad and Tobago?
Which poet subverts the solo verse of “O Little Town of Bethlehem” as follows:
O great classic cadences of English poetry
We blush to hear thee lie
Above thy deep and dreamless.
Christmas Presents
Complete this description of childhood Christmas presents from T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Cultivation of Christmas Trees” (1954):
(Each one with its peculiar and exciting —————)
Which poet included the following items in the happy category of “Useless Presents”?
Bags of moist and many-colored jelly babies and a folded flag and a false nose and a tram-conductor’s cap and a machine that punched tickets and rang a bell; never a catapult; once, by a mistake that no one could explain, a little hatchet; and a celluloid duck that made, when you pressed it, a most unducklike sound, a mewing moo that an ambitious cat might make who wished to be a cow.
Christmas Food
Which poet, in the play “Turkey and Bones and Eating and We Liked It”, said:
The life of the turkies here exist after Christmas. We were surprised to see that. So many of them were eaten that we supposed there were no more.
Here is the middle stanza of Paul Muldoon’s Christmas Eve poem “Trance”:
Someone mutters a flame from lichen
and eats the red-and-white Fly Agaric
while the others hunker in the dark,
taking it in turn
to drink his mind-expanding urine.
One by one their reindeer
nuzzle in.
According to the anthropological theory to which this alludes, who or what inspired the myth of Father Christmas?
Apocalyptic Nativities
Which poet ended her 1942 collection Mother, What Is Man? with these lines:
But the child that is Noble and not Mild
He lies in his cot. He is unbeguiled.
He is Noble, he is not Mild,
And he is born to make men wild.
Who wrote the poem “A Penitent Considers Another Coming of Mary”, which ends:
Mary would not punish men —
If Mary came again.
Late Victorians
I speak now from my home and from my heart to you all. To men and women so cut off by the snows, the desert or the sea, that only voices out of the air can reach them; to those cut off from fuller life by blindness, sickness, or infirmity; and to those who are celebrating this day with their children and grandchildren. To all—to each—I wish a Happy Christmas. God Bless You!
Which septuagenarian poet wrote these words for the first Christmas Day broadcast by George V in 1932?
Which octogenarian poet wrote “Yuletide in a Younger World” (1927), the first poem to appear in the Ariel Poems pamphlet series, which the publishers marketed as an alternative to Christmas cards?
Guess the Christmas Poet
Who is the poet playing Father Christmas at a London department store in this still from the 1937 documentary Calendar of the Year?
Who is the poet in the Christmas jumper?
Answers will be sent to paid subscribers on December 23rd!